


Whispers and Echoes

by LadyJanus



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/M, Resolutions - Episode Tag, Star Trek: Voyager AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 18:28:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3906316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanus/pseuds/LadyJanus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tuvok never contacts the Videans or goes back for Kathryn and Chakotay at the end of the episode "Resolutions".</p>
<p>Disclaimer: All belongs to the Gods on the Mount—Paramount.  I just get to play chess with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whispers and Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> One of my first forays into fanfiction and posting on the internet - way back in the dark ages around 2002-2003 when I had a Geo Cities account.

#  Part 1: Getting to know you

 

Captain's personal log, Stardate 50561.3—God, I have to stop calling these Captain's logs, I'm not a starship captain anymore, I haven't been one for the past nine months and will never be one again. I have to accept that.

 

Chakotay didn't come home again last night and I've spent the last six hours just lying awake, watching the first snowfall and listening for the sounds that would indicate that he had come home to me ... that he understood what we had to do. 

 

_Home_.

 

It is the only dwelling, the only sign of sentient habitation on this entire planet. It's funny how after all my resistance to it, I've come to think of this place as home almost against my will. Much of that is his doing. I can't imagine what I would have done here alone and as I watch the bright splashes of colour paint the morning sky, I am selfishly glad I'm not here on this frozen planet alone. Except he is not here with me—not in my bed, making me feel warm and safe; not in his bed, making soft comforting snores or even just puttering around the house, his presence alone reminding me every moment that even under these circumstances, I am loved.

 

Three months ago, the night we became lovers, I vowed to myself that there would be nothing I would deny this man if it were in my power to give him, and two days ago, I broke that vow.  There was no way he could have known that I'd made it, but I knew. I've never been a particularly religious person—as a scientist, I've never had any need or use for a God and I don't know that I believe that I need one now.  But I find myself praying—in between bouts of crying, I find myself praying every moment that I have the strength to do what I must.

 

****

 

 

"Is that really an ancient legend?"

 

There was laughter in his voice and a twinkle in his eyes as he answered her. "No, but that made it easier to say." 

 

Kathryn savoured the memory of that evening in her mind as she had on numerous occasions over the past month since that magical night when she had retired to her bed alone.  She remembered with a chuckle the delicious feeling of her fingertips tingling at the touch of his hand as they sat for long moments with their fingers intertwined.

 

Kathryn dusted her hands free of the dirt and looked with satisfaction at the neat, weeded rows of Talaxian tomato seedlings as she reached for her cup of coffee.  Suddenly the same tidal-wave of emotion she has been feeling in his presence lately washed over her, leaving her inundated with the knowledge that he loves her, and she knew that he was behind her even before he began to speak.  She found herself accepting his help to stand, going inside, and as so many times in the past month, her mouth carried on the light-hearted conversation, while her brain is otherwise engaged. 

 

She delighted in watching his mouth as he spoke and his eloquent gestures—the language of his finely toned body. 

 

Suddenly she found herself tuning into what they were talking about—a boat.  She looked down at the plans for the small craft and another wave of pleasure washed over her as it did with every thing he does to make her life easier, to help her accept their fate.  They could explore the river, he told her.

 

Yes, they would explore and learn this new world together, this New Earth as they've called it.  After a long drawn out moment of awkward silence, she realised her breathing had changed, that she was staring into his eyes—and for an awkward moment she was sure he could see the love there she hasn't the will to hide and the courage to tell him.

 

She watched the knowing grin tug at his lips as he resumed speaking. "As I was saying, we could explore the river further -get a better idea of the immediate vicinity without taxing the shuttle craft too much.  I'd still like to continue the planetary surveys—track the weather systems, perhaps learn more about how those coherent plasma patterns form during the storms, but—"

 

"But the boat would be wonderful for a lazy Saturday afternoon ride—see where the river takes us," she finished softly, barely breathing.

 

Chakotay nodded as she bent to get a closer look at the plans.  "I was thinking of calling her _Voyager_ ," he said and she turned to face him in surprise.  "We needn't stop exploring Kathryn, even if it's not the stars."

 

She felt her heart tighten at the thought of her _Voyager_ getting further and further away from her each day.  As she looked into his concerned eyes, she smiled, thankful for his gift. "Thank you, and we can still explore the stars Chakotay—just new and different ones."

 

"You still think about them, don't you," he said taking her hand.

 

"Every day," she replied softly. "I dream of them each night. Sometimes, it's so real, that I wake up and reach for my uniform, thinking about the solution to that problem B'Elanna had with the plasma injectors yesterday—except it wasn't yesterday, it was over four months ago and—" 

 

She met his eyes with a wry smile.  "And I'm sure B'Elanna figured it out long ago, just as I'm sure Tuvok will get them home."

 

"I miss them too," he whispered as he drew her to him. After a few moments, they broke the awkward embrace and smiled at each other.  "Well, why don't I go see about dinner," he murmured moving into the small kitchen area.

 

She followed him and pulled the small bowl of vegetables to her. "When are we going to be able to start building it?" she asked as she pulled out the chopping board. Within the first two weeks of being stranded, they had quickly determined that when it came to cooking, the safest thing was to have her chop vegetables, or basically do all the chores that had nothing to do with actually getting anywhere close to the stove.

 

"I was thinking of two days," he replied over his shoulder as he placed the green rice-like grain in the cooker.  The replicator would only be used in times of emergency—it was far too precious a commodity for every day use.  Therefore, in order to become more self-sufficient, they ate mostly what they could grow, gather or hunt, saving the replicator energy for emergency medicines, rations in the face of disaster, and essential nutrient supplements that couldn't be synthesised by the plants and animals native to this world.

 

"I've seen a few trees that I think would be great.  We can go out and choose one or two tomorrow. It shouldn't take more than a week or two to put her together; after that it's just a matter of seeing where the current takes us."  He chuckled softly as he took the vegetables from her. "It's getting back that's going to be the bitch, rowing against the current is hard work."

 

Kathryn gave him an impish smile as she stole one of the crunchy vegetable stalks before he could get it into the steamer.  It was one of her favourites, a celery-like reed that tasted a little like spicy radishes, which she had discovered growing along the riverbank.

 

"Rowing? I thought that I saw a design for a grav-engine in the plans?" she retorted.

 

"Hey, you're the one who's always saying that we have to conserve our energy sources," he replied, taking a devilish delight in her surprise that he would turn one of her own arguments against her.  "It's going to be man power—or woman power—all the way, except for emergencies."

 

"Darn," she pouted in mock dismay.  "And here I was thinking that we would go for leisurely cruises."

 

"Uh-uh," he grinned.  "You Captain, are going to have to work for your pleasure—"

 

Kathryn couldn't help but giggle as the realisation of how his words sounded dawned on him, heating his face beneath his deep tan.  She met his embarrassed eyes and decided to turn up the heat just a notch; she lived for these little flirtatious encounters.

 

"Oh I am, am I, Commander Chakotay?" she purred softly with the stalk of celery-reed resting lightly against her cheek.  "Well, we'll just have to see about that, won't we," she continued as she walked away munching on the vegetable. She knew instinctively that he wouldn't take his eyes off her and she found herself putting a little extra sway into her walk as she made her way outside.

 

****

 

 

"My, but you are a curious little beastie, aren't you?" Chakotay heard her laughing voice calling clearly as he approached the swimming area.  He stopped just before the bushes gave way to the natural clearing and watched her a little further downstream, lazily paddling to keep herself roughly in line with the tree branch which supported the object of her one-sided conversation.  The little monkey-like primate lay along the branch chattering to her intently.

 

"Is that so?" she answered after a moment.  "Yes, I can see where that might be a problem for you.  After all, I can't keep calling you "Hey you" and I have to have a name to distinguish you from all the other primates on this planet," she laughed as she pulled herself up onto the grassy bank and reached for her towel. "How about George?" she asked as the little creature sat up and looked down at her.  "Would you like that?  Curious George."  Chakotay found himself admiring the delicious curves her black one-piece swimsuit did little to hide from the imagination.  Its high cut accentuated her shapely legs and slender lines as she held up a hand to the little primate.  "Now all we need is for the Man in the Yellow Hat to come along."

 

Chakotay chuckled to himself, drew his handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it around his head.  "Would a Man in a Red Bandanna do?" he quipped as she turned in surprise.

 

After a moment, she seemed to catch her train of thought and answered him, "I'm afraid I'm not the one you'd have to ask about that—ask Curious George here."

 

"Curious George?" he asked, pulling his shirt off over his head. A smile tugged at his lips as he caught her staring at his broad, hairless chest before she brought her towel up to run through her hair.

 

"Yes," she answered, vigorously drying the auburn locks made darker by the water. "It's from an ancient children's book about a little monkey who lived with a man with a yellow hat and was always getting into trouble because of his curiosity."

 

He grinned up at the animal now clinging to the branch above his head. "Well Curious George, will I do?" he asked.  The primate chittered a string of expletives and swung itself up into the canopy with lightening speed.  "I guess that's a no," he laughed as he kicked off his shoes.

 

"He'll come around," she assured him as she spread the blanket and pulled the refrigerated picnic hamper to her.  She opened it and removed a bottle of juice as he took off his slacks. "Would you like to take a swim before we eat?" she asked holding out a glass of juice to him.

 

Chakotay looked down into the crystal water flowing past.  He felt hot and sticky in the summer heat, and he got the feeling that she needed a little time to compose herself. He smiled at her as he accepted the beverage.  "I think I'll take a quick dip just to cool off," he replied, downing the drink and quickly slipping into the river before he responded to the spark that leapt into her eyes at his words. 

 

The water was indeed cool, but if anything, it heightened his awareness of her watching him from the bank.  He chuckled softly to himself before diving beneath the surface.  Everything they said to each other these days seemed loaded with innuendoes and double-entendres—even the smallest comments. He didn't want to rush her, but since she had finally began really noticing he was a man and she was definitely a woman, it was taking all his self-discipline to keep his hands off her. Three days before, watching her hips sway seductively as she left the kitchen after their small battle of words, it was all he could do to keep from running after her and pulling that tormenting little body to his so that she could feel the evidence of her slow torture.

 

As he made his way back against the current with a series of powerful strokes, he glimpsed her kneeling with her back to him as she unpacked their meal and wondered again whatever possessed him to suggest this picnic that morning. But he knew exactly what had possessed him—just that sight, Kathryn in her bathing suit. 

 

Adolescent, but effective—maybe too effective.  It conjured up memories of the first time he'd seen her in nothing more than a simple towel, made more erotic by the fact that she seemed unaware of her nudity as she took a childish delight in the discovery of the monkey. As the animal had disappeared into the night, her mind still focused on finding a cure for their disease, she suddenly became conscious of her situation and it was the first indication he had that she was seeing more than just the Commander in front of her. Now after four months alone together, he could see her actively beginning to consider the possibilities—possibilities he had been ready for a long time before even setting foot on this deserted world.

 

She laughed as he joined her on the bank, vigorously shaking the water from his hair, now a few centimetres longer than he had kept it on Voyager. "Stop," she ordered backing away from him as he advanced.  "You're as bad as Bear."

 

"Bear?" he asked curiously as he dried off.

 

"My dog," she replied still laughing as he sat down beside her. "She always made sure I got a thorough soaking after giving her a bath." 

 

He smiled at her thoughtfully as she handed him a bowl of salad. She hadn't talked much about her family and those she'd left behind on Earth, and he realised that it had been a long time since he had seen the picture of her with the smiling man who watched her lovingly as she held the large, huggable Irish setter between them. In fact, she had removed it from her ready room some months before they had been stranded and he wondered now at the significance of that.

 

"You miss her, don't you," he said in a low voice as he accepted a sandwich.

 

There was a fondness in her voice as she spoke, "Yes.  I remember the last time I saw her, just before I headed out to rendezvous with the rest of my crew at DS9."  She laughed ruefully and shook her head, "I couldn't figure out why all of a sudden she was so lethargic and had gained so much weight.  It turned out she was pregnant—talk about being oblivious."  Chakotay chuckled softly as she continued laughing. "Mark had a field day teasing me about it—" 

 

She broke of suddenly and looked out over the river.  Mark.  The comfortable, laughing man in the picture.  The brilliance of her smile was dimmed by the sorrow in her eyes as she continued in a soft voice, "He promised to take care of Bear and her puppies—sometimes I wonder how many there were."  She turned up the wattage on that smile in an effort to shake off the nostalgia and the grief.  "Anyway, I've always had a dog—and even when I didn't, there was always my sister Phoebe's menagerie."

 

"Were they all Irish setters?" he asked casting about for something neutral to say.  He saw the surprise in her eyes as she realised that he must have done more than just notice the picture in her ready room.

 

"Lord no," she answered grinning.  "Bramble would not be caught dead with Bear's exalted pedigree," she laughed merrily.  "I don't remember getting my first dog—Mr. Tuggles," she said leaning back on one elbow.  "He was always just there, then one day when I was six, he wasn't there anymore.  I remember my parents telling me that he'd died and me crying, but not much else about it—he'd always been this gigantic ball of fur, at least from my perspective.  I think he'd been a St. Bernard, but to tell you the truth, I'm not sure.  Then there was Bramble, a wonderful, wiry little hairball, that never reached any farther than my knees standing on his hind paws, but was always there to lick away the tears.  He was a thorough mutt and quite proud of it too."

 

Chakotay joined in her merriment and admired her ability to pull him into her little anecdotes.  "He died just before I left for the Academy—he was nearly twelve years old and I remember wondering whom I would find with enough fur to soak up my troubles. Then for the next few years, I was basically dogless, I guess Phoebe's Blanca served double duty whenever I was home, but it wasn't the same.  She wasn't bad as far as substitutes go, but she was one of those slow, languid Samoyas and I guess I liked my dogs with a bit more attitude."

 

She laughed wryly again.  "Now if you want to talk about a dog with attitude, then Petunia was the one you should have met.  She found me one cold winter day when I wasn't sure that life was worth living and basically took me in hand—helped me get through a particularly bad time in my life." He heard the sorrow in her voice again, and watched the fleeting shadow pass across her face.  "Phoebe used to say she couldn't tell who was the pet and who was the mistress.  She used to complain that Petunia was the worst trained dog in the known universe, and she was right.  I'd tell Petunia to do something and she'd fix me with that autocratic stare of hers and order me to do whatever it was she wanted to."

 

Chakotay laughed heartily as the image of the insubordinate pup defying her sprang into his mind.  "Petunia sounds like a certain starship Captain I know."  Kathryn joined his laughter as he continued to look into her eyes.  "What breed of dog was she?"

 

"You're right," she replied giggling, pointing her fork at him. "Don't laugh, mister, you'd be surprised at the wisdom one can learn from a dog.  Anyway, she was a black Lab—always there to take me in hand, tell me what's what and then kick me out on my keister when she had more important matters to attend to.  When she died—goodness, almost seven years ago, just after I made Captain, I remember sitting in my quarters one night just bawling over my Mother's communique.  My ship left the next morning for my first deep space mission and what pulled me together was the thought that Petunia would certainly have taken issue with the way I was carrying on.  When I returned six months later, two wonderful beings entered my life—an annoying, unyielding, insufferable, implacable Vulcan I couldn't stand, and the most gorgeous ball of ginger fur imaginable."

 

"Wait a minute," Chakotay sputtered incredulously.  "You couldn't stand Tuvok?"

 

"Not a whit," she answered with a grin.  "The first time we met, he took issue with almost everything I'd done during the mission, routed out every possible tactical mistake under the sun.  Who could live up to that standard of Vulcan perfection?  Nowadays, he'll tell you that I'm only marginally better. I suppose that's why he felt it his duty to stick with this lowly, fallible human, and I'm glad he did. But during those first weeks when he transferred to my command, there were times that I wanted to throw him in the brig just for being alive and for being Vulcan!"  Chakotay howled hysterically at her indignation as she continued.  "I mean, I'm a reasonably neat and tidy person—"

 

"Are you kidding Kathryn?" Chakotay interrupted still chuckling. "Except when you're cooking, you're the biggest neat-freak I know."

 

"Am I a neat-freak?" she asked in concern, suddenly serious.

 

He grinned and nodded at her as he answered, "In comparison to me you are.  You've seen what a few months of lax discipline has done to me."  She chuckled as she thought of his sleeping alcove; every few days he'd clean it up, but it always looked like a plasma storm had passed through it within forty-eight hours.  "It was one of the hardest things I had to contend with at the Academy—those damned surprise inspections.  I finally had to just train myself into the habit of being neat, but with the Marquis, it was a habit I soon fell out of.  Luckily, I beamed on board Voyager with nothing more than the shirt on my back and my medicine bundle, which Bandera was thoughtful enough to save for me.  Once back in uniform, it was easy to train myself back into that routine since I didn't have a lot of belongings to throw about the place at the beginning.  But, as you can see, being neat isn't something that comes naturally to me."

 

"No it certainly isn't," she agreed laughing.

 

"It's funny how the smallest, most inconsequential thing can trip you up," he mused.  "When I entered the Academy, I was certain that I was ready for all the big challenges they would set me—ready to prove myself to my father, my family, my people. I never expected anything so small and petty as tidying up my room to nearly put me on the probation list my first year as a cadet."

 

"I know what you mean," she laughed.  "I had the exact opposite problem—I guess I am a bit of a control nut, which is why I suppose the powers that be at the Academy saddled me with a pair of identical Diasoman twins named ThrumPol for roommates in my freshman year."

 

"You ended up with two roommates?" he asked in surprise.

 

"Yes," she chuckled softly.  "They were Diasoman twins, not ready yet to be separated from each other—enthusiastic, full of life and energy ... and messy! We also almost ended up on the probation list when Pol and I failed our second surprise inspection. Our Cadet Group Commander was Commander Etienne Mallet, and he assigned Pol and I a simulation puzzle to figure out.  If we didn't solve the puzzle, it would have severe repercussions on our future as Starfleet cadets.  Needless to say, since it was a scientific puzzle, I basically took over and shut poor Pol out until almost the very end when we began to get desperate.  I was content to figure it out all by myself, and Pol was content to coast along with what ever I told her to do. It took me a long time to realise that the point to the exercise was to test those particular personality quirks. It was to see if I could give up enough control and trust someone else to do their part, because there was no way I could do it alone.  And it tested whether Pol could become assertive enough in the face of my personality, to stand her ground instead of always doing what other people told her to do."

 

"Overcoming our small failings is always the hardest thing to do precisely because they are so small … we don't treat them with enough importance," he said quietly.  After a moment he grinned, "So what did you do about your insufferable Vulcan? How on Earth did you make him your friend?"

 

"I've never been quite sure how our relationship evolved into friendship," she replied in a nostalgic voice.  "It just did I suppose, once I stopped thinking of him as "that insufferable Vulcan".  The first thing I did do however, was start putting up my hair—"

 

"Oh no, the _Iron Bun_!  You mean I have Tuvok to thank for that?" he groaned comically.  "You know, Paris used to take bets on how many strands would escape it during the next fire fight."

 

She eyed him speculatively and then laughed.  "That was always one of the things I always felt was most untidy about myself, and if I was going to insist on wearing my hair long, I had to find a style that was both dignified and easy to take care of. Looking like the _Madwoman of Challot_ was definitely easy to take care of, but hardly dignified. And by the way, Mister—" she said in outrage.  "When was Paris ever close enough to see how many strands escaped my bun?"

 

He held his hands up before his face as he laughed.  "Ok, guilty as charged Ma'am," he said giving her a devilish grin.  "After all, he had to have an impartial observer to ensure he ran an honest game and didn't try fleecing some poor unsuspecting ensign.  He used to categorise the severity of the fight by just how much hair had come loose.  The categories were "a light summer sprinkle"—just a few wisps came free, generally less than twenty strands, blue skies, clear sailing. The next was "a cool summer shower"—enough to get thoroughly wet, maybe with a little lightning and thunder, a small forelock may have got loose, but nothing to be worried about."

 

Chakotay could see her obvious delight as he catalogued the vagaries of her hair during battle.  "Then we have the "full blown thunderstorm".  Lots of lightning, thunder, the whole she-bang, when entire sections had fallen out of the bun.  It generally meant that Voyager had taken quite a few blows and they were easy to categorise—there was always a consensus on them as there was little quibbling on how many strands it took to make a lock— Awww!" he yelped peevishly as she punched him playfully in the arm. 

 

"Hey, I didn't make up the categories, I just reported what I saw. Finally, we have the big one—the "hurricane"—utter decimation of the Iron Bun. That we didn't see too often because it generally meant that we'd just squeaked past with little more than avoiding a warp core breach, but it also meant no quibbling because it took you longer to put it up and there were more witnesses to the complete devastation." He watched her laugh and didn't add that those times, despite the danger, were his personal favourites or that at that moment, with her sun-dried hair blowing in the afternoon breeze, the devastation was once again complete.

 

"I can see that my crew needed more to occupy their time if my hair was such a hot item for discussion," she gasped in outrage.  Then she gasped again, but this time, pain swiftly replaced her hilarity as her face clouded and she looked away.

 

"Kathryn," he said softly in concern as he tentatively touched her shoulder. He felt a shudder pass through her as she drew her knees up beneath her chin and hugged them to her. "What is it Kathryn?"

 

She covered the hand at her shoulder briefly and gave it a gentle squeeze, but she didn't look at him.  "I'll be all right Chakotay, don't worry," she whispered hoarsely. "It's just—it's just that I feel like I've failed them, I promised to get them home and I didn't." He felt her shoulder shake beneath his touch as she cried softly and heard the quiver in her voice. "Just now, I said "my crew" and I realised they weren't my crew any longer—they're Tuvok's crew now.  They were my responsibility and I failed them."

 

Chakotay took a chance and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her shaking body.  After stiffening for a moment, she slowly relaxed as if she'd made up her mind and laid her head on his shoulder as she wept.  "You didn't fail them Kathryn," he said stroking her slightly damp hair as he held her.  "You took them as far as you could, then you did what was best for them; you entrusted them to Tuvok's care when you were no longer able to go on.  No one could have foreseen this Kathryn, it wasn't your fault … no one is to blame."

 

****

 

 

"Look Captain, what do you expect me to say?"  Kathryn studied his tortured face in the dim light of the dying campfire.  After a pause, he continued angrily, "I know all your arguments, sir, but I've got to do what I must! I have to go home!" 

 

As Kathryn pushed out of her sleeping bag in concern, his next words froze her in her path—mainly because of the sheer venom with which they were spoken.

 

"That _one_ colony may not mean much in the big picture—but that one colony was the reason I joined Starfleet in the first damned place! And if the Almighty Federation is not going to protect her, what the hell am I doing here then? My Mother called me today; my Father is dead.  As his only son, sir, there are certain things I must do and if I have to resign my commission to accomplish them, then so be it, but one way or another I am going home!"

 

She collected herself as his anguished sobs reached her and moved quickly to his side.  "Chakotay," she called softly as she gently shook him.  "Chakotay, wake up, you're having a dream."

 

"No!" The long drawn out syllable was an agony to hear as his wild eyes looked up into hers in the darkness. "Kathryn?" he called in confusion.  He touched his wet cheek and broke eye contact in embarrassment as he suddenly registered her closeness and his surroundings.

 

Kathryn hastened to put him at his ease.  "You were having a dream Chakotay," she said moving away to give him a chance to compose himself.  She stoked the fire in silence and fetched another log before putting the pot of water on to boil.  "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked turning to face him.  "You spoke a little in your sleep—" 

 

She could see the surprise in his eyes as the embarrassment returned and decided he that had a right to know—that he needed to know what he had unconsciously said. "You were telling your former Captain that you had to go home—that your Father had died and that you had to defend your home since the Federation wouldn't."

 

"I see," he said softly as he sat up.

 

The moment drew out beyond awkwardness and unsure of whether she should press him, she busied herself as the water began to boil.  "Would you like some hot tea?"

 

"Yes. Thank you," he answered hoarsely.  "Sorry to wake you," he continued after a moment.

 

She chuckled as she brewed the herbal concoction he'd blended a few months before.  "Hey, who's the resident insomniac around here?" she chided meeting his eyes. "As I remember it, I've kept you awake on more than one occasion with my nocturnal ramblings." He flashed her a wan smile as he accepted the steaming cup.  "If you ever just need to talk Chakotay, I'm always here," she said softly holding his gaze.

 

"Thanks Kathryn," he replied.  After a few moments of sipping their tea in silence, he said, "The anniversary of my Father's death is in a week."

 

She looked at him, stunned by his admission.  "I'm sorry Chakotay," she said sincerely, angry with herself for not realising it sooner.

 

"I'm all right; it's been four years," he continued.  "I guess realised it today while I was showing you that nest of blue speckled eggs.  I remember my Father showing me a nest of peak-eagle eggs once during a hiking trip when I was seven.  Of course they weren't eagles, those are Earth birds and these were closer to flying mammals than to birds, rather like the duck-billed platypus. But they were majestic creatures," he finished quietly.

 

"They sound wonderful," she returned.  "I wonder what the ones we found today will hatch into."

 

"I don't know.  Perhaps those ubiquitous sparrow-like things that are always around—they seem a little small for any of the larger predatory birds around here."

 

Kathryn studied his face again in the firelight and could still see the shadows of his nightmare in his eyes.  Again she hesitated to press him further.  She emptied the dregs from her cup and stood.  "Well, perhaps we should try and get back to sleep.  Good night Chakotay—"

 

As she headed back to her sleeping bag, he caught her hand and she looked down into his eyes again.  "A few years ago, if anyone had asked me why I was so angry, I would have told them that it was because the Federation had abandoned my people.  It would have been true, but it would not have been the entire truth Kathryn.  I was angry because he died and I wasn't there—he was too old to be running around trying to defend the colony, he'd never been trained for it.  But I'd been, only I never returned; out among the stars was where I'd always wanted to be and I didn't want to give it up. He died alone—chances are he never even knew what hit him, he never even saw the enemy.  They found him two days later when the Marquis reinforcements arrived and took back the orbital stronghold. They brought his body back to my Mother—he was dead and there was so much I never told him, so much I would never be able to tell him. 

 

“I'd put my trust, all my faith in the Federation when I left home, and I was so sure that it had been right to.  Then at the moment my Mother's words registered, it seemed like the foundation of everything I'd ever done in my entire adult life to that point had been completely wrong.  It seemed as if I had abandoned my family, my people and my Father—and that so many people I'd known, grown up with and loved all my life had paid the price. I guess there was just so much anger and hatred inside, that leaving Starfleet and joining the Marquis seemed like my only choice."

 

She knelt beside him and hugged him tightly, feeling the tension flow out of him. "I understand Chakotay," she whispered softly.  "I understand.  Thank you for telling me."

 

****

 

 

"Come on Kathryn," he yelled enthusiastically.  "Pull!"

 

She groaned as her muscles ached, and gritted her teeth as she pulled on the oars.  "There has got to be an easier way Chakotay!" she puffed.

 

He laughed at her red face as she strained against the current and she childishly stuck her tongue out at him.  "Hey, I've done my part Kathryn, and I seem to remember you laughing a while back.  Anyway, we're almost at the landing and it's wonderful exercise—you'll thank me later for insisting."

 

"Yeah?" she retorted.  "Well right now, my muscles are cursing you damn it!"

 

"You're doing just fine," he replied good-naturedly.  "Just a couple more strokes and we'll be ashore."  A few minutes later, she felt the little craft butt against the bank and she stopped exhausted as he jumped out.  She slumped over her oars as he pushed the boat up over the crude berth of logs he'd constructed and tied it off to a large sturdy tree.  "Here, let me help you out Kathryn," he said lifting her out and setting her on her feet.  She leaned tiredly against the boat as he reached in for their gear. "Why don't you go on ahead," he continued softly.  "You've earned it—you did great today.  I'll be along with this stuff in a few minutes."

 

Kathryn looked up into his eyes gratefully and nodded, then on impulse, stepped into his arms and hugged him tenderly.  "Thank you," she said, burrowing her head into his chest as his arms closed about her.  "She's a great little ship, worthy of her name. I had a wonderful time—even this last little bit," she chuckled softly.

 

"I'm glad you enjoyed yourself," he replied as they broke the embrace. "Go on now. I want to see if I caught anything in the fish trap over the last two days."

 

"I'll see you in a few minutes," she called as she dragged herself up the path to the house.  She smiled to herself as the yard came into view and if she hadn't been so tired she would have run to her tub and kissed it.  She ran her hands over its satin smooth surface after removing its cover, scattering the leaves that had collected on it. This was what her aching body had been craving during that gruelling row back. 

 

The sound of the water rushing into the tub was almost as much of a balm as the soak she was looking forward to, she thought as she poured a generous amount of peach scented bubble bath underneath the faucet and watched the white foam appear.  Inside the little house, everything was exactly as they had left it.  She hurried into her bedroom pulling off her sweaty clothing as she crossed the threshold and throwing everything onto the floor. Wrapping herself in her robe and collecting her towel, she quickly returned to the tub and tested the water with her hand—it was excruciatingly hot, just the way she liked it.

 

She deftly wrapped her hair into a loose bun and stuck in the hairpins she kept on the side of the tub's platform for just that purpose.  She then removed her robe and threw it on to the low over-hanging branch with the towel before climbing the platform and lowering herself into the steaming water with a satisfied moan. She could feel the heat penetrate every square inch of her body and could swear that she felt each individual muscle as it soaked up the warmth and relaxed a little.  She groaned softly, only one more thing would make it complete, but she was loathed to move from that position. Slowly she pulled herself upright and reached over the edge for her small wash cloth, which she soaked in the hot water, then placed over her face before sinking again with another moan beneath the luxurious scented foam.

 

****

 

 

He shivered as her soft moan carried on the wind reached his ears as she lowered her body into the steaming tub in the waning afternoon light. He had known all afternoon that this had been her goal as she gamely rowed her portion of the distance back and had thought that his delay with the fish trap would afford him enough time for her to be safely in the tub before he had to pass.  Gods—no matter what his conscience was telling him at the moment about the morality of watching her even at this distance, he couldn't tear his eyes away. 

 

Another moan reached his ears as he finally uprooted himself from that spot and took another step forward.  He froze instantly and watched her reach out of the tub to fish for something lying on the platform—her wash cloth—which she draped over her face before slipping back into the water with another excruciating moan.  If she only knew what something as simple as her moans, or the soft sighs she made at night when she was sleeping did to him. After a few moments, when he was sure that she wouldn't move again, he shook himself out of his fugue state and collected his wits before continuing up the path to the house. As he approached, she removed the cloth from her face and smiled at him.

 

"Enjoying your soak?" he asked as he dropped most of his bundles.

 

Kathyrn laughed at his non sequitur as she answered.  "Immensely," she drawled in a languorous voice and he wondered if that sexy tone was just a figment of his overheated imagination.  "Did you catch anything?" she asked as she sat up a little straighter and rested her arms along the rim of the tub.  It didn't escape his notice that this action caused her breasts to ride up a little over the surface of the water before they were modestly covered by those darned little bubbles.

 

He held the three large fish up, two in one hand and a large green one in the other as he recovered his voice.  "Tonight we eat like kings Kathryn," he quipped.  "Only these three fine fellows were in the trap—either the smaller ones were too smart to get trapped, smart enough to navigate their way out, too small for the mesh I used, or too dumb to get away from these greedy guys.  Anyway, I'm going to clean them before I take my shower; dinner should be ready in about ninety minutes."

 

"I'll be in to help you in a few minutes," she said softly.

 

"No rush Kathryn," he assured her as he removed his shirt. "I'll just leave the fish to marinade in my special blend of sauces and spices while I take my shower. The only one I'm not sure of is this big, green beast here.  I'll finish running a thorough tricorder analysis before I clean him."

 

She nodded and he turned towards the house carrying his prizes. "Chakotay," she called and he half turned to meet her eyes.  "Thanks again for a wonderful week-end.  It was the best camping trip I've ever been on."

 

"You're welcome Kathryn," he replied, unable to stop the wide grin that spread over his features and ducked into the house before he could further embarrass himself.  It had been one of the best camping trips he'd ever been on also and he could attribute it almost wholly to her presence.  She had even been able to turn waking from that nightmare into a positive experience for him and more and more each day she brought him peace in a dozen little ways without even being aware that she did. 

 

He brought his attention back to the tricorder readings on the green fish—darn, just as he'd suspected—it was no good he realised and dropped it into the yellow specimen bucket next to the sink.  A small gland had ruptured and the poison had spread to most of the muscle tissue.  He'd have to see what Kathryn's biochemical analysis made of the substance. He washed his hands thoroughly and double checked the other two flat, smooth, black fish just to make sure they were what he thought and that they hadn't been contaminated by the green beast. As he began to cut away the tough outer skin to get at the succulent flesh beneath, he heard her come in behind him.

 

"You should go and take your shower Chakotay," she said softly. "Relax for a little while before you worry about dinner."

 

He smiled down at her fondly as she crouched by the pail, tricorder in hand. Her hair was damp and she exuded the slight perfume of the peach bubble bath and the wonderful herbal shampoo she liked to use.   "I'm almost finished with these two, just give me a few more minutes to get them filleted and into the marinade," he replied, feeling a wave of desire wash over him.

 

She nodded absently as she became caught up in the readings from the fish. "So Mr. Green Beastie, you're not fit for human consumption," she muttered.  He didn't answer her as he finished filleting the first fish, familiar by now with her habit of talking aloud while her mind raced through a scientific problem.  "Interesting," she said after a few more minutes of silence. "There are two compounds here I haven't seen before.  I'm going to freeze Mr. Beastie here and take some samples in the morning. Perhaps in a few days we can see about capturing a live specimen—see exactly what they're being used for.

 

He watched her scoop the fish into a sample bag, seal it and pop it into a large empty, cryo-freeze unit before re-fitting the unit back into place in her specimen storage chamber.  She would then spend the next day taking various tissue samples and subjecting them to a battery of tests.  She then put the pail into through the sterilising unit before returning it to its customary place by the sink and drifting out of the kitchen area into her bedroom.  He smiled to himself as he added the last of the spices to the marinating fillets—she was getting better.  Two months before, she would have begun obsessively testing the fish as soon as she had found those compounds and insisted that they go out and set the trap then and there to capture another one, but she was finally learning to take things in stride.  Tomorrow was soon enough to begin learning all there was to know about that fish and she had more than enough time in which to accomplish that task.

 

****

 

 

Kathryn turned gingerly in her bed again for the billionth time as she tried to find a position that would accommodate her aching body.  The evening had been perfect—his dinner superb—but it seemed to her now that there were special lumps in her Starfleet issue, ultra-ergonomic mattress made just to torture her poor, abused flesh. Another painful whimper escaped her before she could stop it, as she discovered that her right calf had cramped into a tight ball.  She held her breath and listened as she tried to sit up and massage the offending leg.

 

"Kathryn, are you all right?"  His voice came from just beyond her door.

 

She sighed softly and tried to keep the pain from her voice. "Sorry to wake you Chakotay," she answered, then winced as she received another excruciating pain signal from her leg.

 

"Wake me?" he laughed.  "Who could sleep with all the racket you're making, moaning and groaning."

 

"Well it's all your fault for insisting on rowing—and now I've got a cramp in my leg," she complained peevishly and thought _egads_ , did she ever sound like such a whiner.

 

His laughter rumbled again. "For goodness sake Kathryn, why didn't you say something earlier?  Let me get some massage oil to relieve some of those aches."

 

"All right," she acquiesced meekly, but she knew exactly why she hadn't asked him.  She looked down in dismay at the short, silk slip she had worn to bed in an effort to keep cool. The last time he had given her a massage, she had been wearing one of those comfortable robes Tuvok had given her years ago for her birthday, and she'd still felt like melting into his arms.  But she was in way too much pain to even think of trying to change with him just on the other side of the door.

 

He knocked softly.  "Can I come in?"

 

"Sure."

 

She saw the delighted surprise that sprang into his eyes as he took in her attire in the dim light.  Nor was he anything less than a feast for the eyes clad in nothing more than a brief pair of shorts that seemed to accentuate every muscle in his magnificent—she swallowed the hard lump in her throat.  His legs, she mentally chastised herself, he had magnificent legs.

 

The long awkward silence dragged on as they stared at each other and she began to feel vaguely like a ridiculous schoolgirl.  The Captain decided to take over. 

 

"Well what would you like me to do first?" she asked bluntly, and even in that light she could see him blush to his roots.  _Way to go Captain_ , Kathryn spat, _open big mouth, insert enormous hoof.  Go back to sleep_ , she ordered as she decided that humour was the best way out of this embarrassing situation as his mouth shut with a snap. 

 

"Ah New Earth to Chakotay, calling Chakotay," she teased in a light-hearted voice she prayed didn't sound as desperate as she felt. "The massage Chakotay?"

 

He seemed to snap out of it, grinning sheepishly as she gave a mental sigh of relief.  "Uh, why don't you lie on your stomach," he instructed her.  "And I'll start with your shoulders and upper back, then work my way down—" 

 

She grinned as he became flustered again, and despite her pain, she was beginning to take a rather perverse pleasure in being the source of his obvious discomfort. 

 

"To your legs," he added belatedly as she lay down.  "Then I'll work on your legs," he corrected himself.  She didn't know what little imp made her perform that little wriggle with her hips as she did so, but she was rewarded with another audible gasp from him. She felt the slip ride up a centimetre or two and she peered up to see his hands frozen above her in the act of rubbing the massage oil between them.

 

However, he had his own power over her and she knew that he was well aware of it as he began the massage.  At his first touch she melted, knowing that his body was just inches above hers as he expertly manipulated her flesh.  Against her will, he soon wrung a series of long, drawn out sighs of contentment from her as he kneaded the tension out of her neck, shoulders and arms—and _good Lord_ he still had the rest of her body to go! 

 

If she had won the opening skirmishes, by the time he gently pulled her arms out of the spaghetti straps to afford himself better access to her upper back, she was definitely ready to admit that he was well on his way to winning the war. Muscle after muscle betrayed her to his hands.  Soon she was acutely aware that whatever physical tension he'd liberated from her aching muscles, seemed to concentrate in another part of her anatomy, leaving her powerless to move away from those healing hands.  Yet she knew that every moment he remained brought her closer and closer to the edge of that particular release of tension she definitely would not be able to conceal from him.

 

"Which leg is it Kathryn?" he asked in a low, breathy voice.

 

Her mind screamed at her.  _Humour huh_ , the Captain mocked.  _Well, let's see you get out of this one Kathryn_.

 

God, he was ready to start on her legs, and she found herself speculating wildly whether he would start at the top and work his way down, or if he would start at the bottom and work his way up.  Each presented her with a tantalising prospect as she squeaked, "The right." 

 

As he took hold of her right foot and started massaging the sole, she forgot about her primary mission of extricating herself from the situation with her dignity intact as she luxuriated in every delicious sensation that coursed through her body from each foot.  She heard a low chuckle escape him as she buried her head in her arms and tried to stifle the moan that built in her, only to have it end up sounding like an agonised wail—and the handsome devil would have the nerve to laugh at her. She barely registered the manipulation of her calves—first one then the other.  All she could focus on was the inevitable movement of those hands upwards to the tops of her thighs and she found herself fantasising about exactly where they would stop their torturous journey.

 

"Kathryn, you're beginning to tense up again."  His voice insinuated itself into her fantasy and she murmured incoherently as she tried to make sense of what he was saying. "Kathryn the massage is finished," he said softly.  She turned to him, startled back to reality, barely remembering in time to hang onto her nightgown as she met his twinkling eyes just millimetres away from hers.  It was murder trying to deal with the realisation that the slightest movement on her part would bring her lips crushing up against his perfect mouth.  He grinned and gave devilish chuckle as he pulled back and wiped his hands on his towel.  "Well I guess if you dozed off, I must have done my job well," he commented recapping the small bottle of massage oil.

 

"Very well," she managed to croak.  "That was a wonderful massage, Chakotay.  The—the best I've ever had.  Thank you."

 

"You're welcome Kathryn," he replied looking down as he stood. "Well, good night and sleep well."

 

She nodded and called, "Pleasant dreams Chakotay."

 

He laughed heartily as he backed up those last few steps to the threshold. "Oh don't worry, they will be."  She gasped at him in surprise, but before she could say anything, he delivered his parting shot, "See, I told you Kathryn, that you would work for your pleasure."

 

Game, set and match. 

 

He ducked out of the doorway before she could retaliate and all she could do was lay back and laugh at his sheer audacity.  Through the thin wall, she could hear him settle into the bed on the opposite side and for the umpteenth time, she wondered what kept her playing these flirting games instead of just going to him.  Her playful imp reared its ugly head again and she knocked on the partition between their rooms without stopping to think.

 

"Yes, Kathryn," he answered in a strangely hoarse voice after a moment and she chuckled with recognition of the source of his discomfort. Well, two could play these games of torture and after everything he'd put her through in the last half an hour he deserved everything he got.

 

"I only wanted to say, Chakotay," she began, pronouncing every syllable of his name slowly.  "That I'm going to get you for that someday soon—you won't know when, you won't know how, you won't know where, but you'll know it when it happens." This time she managed to wring an anguished groan from deep within his throat and she finished her challenge in a low seductive voice, "Well good night, Chakotay."

 

"Good night, Kathryn," he managed after a few moments and she smiled again at the audible gasp that came with his obvious change in position. Even on these Starfleet issue, ultra-ergonomic mattresses, with the thin partition and his larger mass, each frustrated move and sound he made came through in perfect clarity.

 

She wondered how he would react if she simply walked into his little alcove one night, dropped her nightgown and climbed into bed with him.  The rush of desire that washed over her told her exactly how she would react to her actions and it was all she could do to keep from moaning aloud, which would no doubt catch his attention again.  As quietly as she could, she sat up, caught the hem of the thin garment and pulled it off over her head.  Removing her brief lace panties required a great deal more manoeuvring skill, but she managed it with the minimum of movement.  She settled back down under the cool sheets—not exactly what she'd been fantasising about, but one day soon, she promised both of them, she wouldn't stop at these excruciating little games of tag.

 

#

 

Part 2: Clearing Driftwood after the Tempest

 

 

The sound of Kathryn crying brokenly in her bedroom was the last thing Chakotay had expected to hear as he entered the shelter one afternoon after a particularly bad plasma storm. 

 

He had foolishly gone walking further than he'd intended late the afternoon before.  By the time he'd caught his bearings and realised that the storm was upon him, he'd found himself in an unfamiliar part of the forest, without a communicator, tricorder or any protection from the fury of the elements.  Finally spotting a craggy overhang of rocks, he'd taken refuge intending to stay only long enough for the storm to let up. 

 

It hadn’t been as bad as some storms they'd weathered so far—including the one that had destroyed much of her equipment.  But it was still bad enough to be caught in it without any protection, and as the hours dragged on, he had hoped she would have the sense to stay inside where it was safe.

 

In a way, it had been all her fault that he'd wandered away so preoccupied by her latest manoeuvre, that he'd lost all track of time and direction as he daydreamed about her while his feet carried him where ever they'd wanted to go. Her audacious retaliation for his comment after her massage was both as devastating and surprising as she had promised—and exceedingly long in coming.  That lady definitely knew how to milk a grudge for all it was worth.

 

Chakotay had been surprised at how easily Kathryn had slipped into their daily routine after the massage—as if she hadn't been aware of his excruciating physical problem that night.  He was sure she’d heard every last laboured breath, but she had been as quiet as the proverbial mouse.  Meanwhile, he lay caught between the twin agonies of her pert little behind covered in glimpses of virginal white lace and the delicious sight of her creamy breasts as she hastened to pull her nightgown up to cover them when she sat up after the massage.  He was equally sure she hadn't been aware that one impudent coral nipple had been peeking over the top of its covering during their entire exchange after the massage. And he hadn’t been about to tell her.

 

However, the next morning she’d been as cool as a cucumber, exceedingly polite and infuriatingly nonplussed by the feelings that were obviously developing between them.  The ensuing two weeks had passed at a snail's pace.  However, the evening he had returned from a night and a day of fasting and meditating in his private place by the river to commemorate his father's death, he'd returned to a thoughtful, sumptuous dinner, carefully prepared with as little cooking as she could possibly manage.  It had consisted of the wild green rice, perfectly steamed vegetables with a little butter, a few other crunchy, raw vegetables with only a slightly scorched cream sauce and a delicious fruit salad with all his favourites served in a tangy blend of their own juices.  Still there hadn't been any sign of her promised retaliation as she worked doggedly collecting data from those damned green fish.  Then two nights ago, the roof had literally caved in on him.

 

Although he’d built it for her and it undoubtedly was her bathtub, every now and then, late in the night when she invariably never used it, he would occasionally draw a bath and relax for a little while.  That evening, he'd been in it for about ten minutes, just floating on a cloud of steam when he heard her sultry voice purring directly into his ear, "Do you mind if I join you, Chakotay?"

 

He'd sat bolt upright, sloshing the water around as his eyes flew open to meet her dancing, impudent ones.  He'd stared at her, unable to believe what he'd just heard, but her direct gaze told him that he hadn't heard wrong.  "Kathryn?" he gasped in utter disbelief. "I—I thought you were sleeping."

 

Testing the temperature of the water with one hand and holding her short peach satin robe closed with the other, she continued to hold his gaze. "I've always wondered if it was big enough for two," she continued as she mounted the platform. Still wearing the robe, she swung her bare legs into the tub as she sat on the rim.  "I seem to be at an impasse with my research on this darned fish Chakotay, and like I've always said from the beginning—"

 

He was aware of the flimsy garment sliding from her shoulders onto the platform behind her an instant before she submerged into the dark, concealing water. "I do my best thinking in the tub," she purred. 

 

He had sat there tongue-tied with his knees drawn up almost beneath his chin, as she settled herself with her legs on the outside of his and each small foot resting lightly against a hip.  He'd almost been terrified of moving, unsure of what he would come into contact with if he were to move—but move he did, and when his legs came into contact with her inner thighs, it only exacerbated his already precarious hold on his control.  This was definitely not a situation conducive to relaxation by any stretch of the imagination and his imagination was currently being stretched to its limits.

 

He'd marvelled at her calm and given her a silent nod, conceding that round in the battle as she continued to speak about her research while her eyes sent out dangerous sparks in his direction.  "Well it seems that I've come to the end of my tests on the compounds in this fish—the darned thing destroys the virus, but the only problem is that it destroys human tissue as well, especially neural tissue."

 

This time he'd regained enough control to trust himself with his voice. "So where do you go from here?"

 

"Nowhere," she'd answered a little sadly.  "At least not for the moment until I can get more samples into culture from the native animals."  She had given him a small wry grin and continued. "I just don't know enough Chakotay.  I'm just going to have to accept that although I'm a classically trained scientist and I'm learning more than I ever have in the past, I just don't have enough specialised background in the bio-sciences to make those intuitive leaps a trained physician or biochemist would make.  I've always leaned more towards the physics and engineering side of things in my training—ask me anything about warp theory or subspace plasma dynamics or metaphasic shielding and I'm in my element. Here I feel like the proverbial fish out of water."

 

He'd chuckled at the image she conjured up in his mind of her lying naked on the on the platform, her body glistening from the water.  "You can't be everything Kathryn," was his soft answer.  "No one can know everything—every secret in the universe.  You can only do so much, keep striving to improve your knowledge, but you also have to accept the fact that you will never find all the answers that you seek."

 

"I know, Chakotay," she'd murmured.  "I know.  And I've also given some serious thought to your suggestion and you're right, we are going to have to come up with some alternatives for concealing our presence here. Voyager found this world, and we can't be sure that others won't come.  I don't want to have to move into some dark, musty cave, but we may not have an alternative.  Anyway, I'm not ready yet to give up my sunshine and tonight I started a search of our database for all the pertinent research on cloaking devices—I may even have a lead already on a possible energy source." 

 

She’d laughed at his obvious surprise at how quickly she’d tackled that problem, and she saucily flicked some water into his face.  "The trialurite ore deposits you picked up in your last survey run of the eastern mountain range may be just the thing if it's pure enough or can be purified enough for our use." 

 

He'd enthusiastically agreed to collect some samples on their next cartographic foray and they'd slipped into a companionable silence for a few minutes before Kathryn the Vixen returned in full force. 

 

"Well, I think I'm all thought out," she'd said in that sexy, smoky voice, alerting him to the fact that the game was still afoot. "How about you, Chakotay, are you relaxed?"

 

"Relaxed, Kathryn?" he'd quipped in amusement as he felt her legs withdraw from their places on either side of him and he wondered how she was going to manage her exit.  "Somehow I don't think that's quite what you had in mind."

 

To his surprise, in one quick, graceful movement, she had pushed herself out of the water so that he got a full view of her back as she stepped out of the tub and had hopped off the platform opposite him before he could collect his scattered wits.  When she came back into view a moment later, she was belting her robe securely and brought her mouth close to his ear again.  "Oh really, Chakotay," she purred softly.  "And tell me, exactly what did you think I had in mind?"

 

The delicious agony had been exquisite and he couldn't even remember when it had ever been possible for him to have an erection like this under water of all places. 

 

"By the gods of my ancestors, Kathryn, it would serve you right if I stood up right now!"  That humiliating admission in a tight frustrated voice had been well worth the sight of her eyes widening in surprise and the deep blush he could see suffusing her face even in that dim light.  "Now will you please leave, you little minx, before I lose all semblance of control and get us both into a heap of trouble?"

 

She'd given a nervous, strangled laugh as she met his tortured eyes, before managing a hoarse, "Good night, Chakotay."  Then in a more steady voice, she'd continued as she stood at the threshold.  "Don't stay out too late."

 

He'd splashed the water in frustration as he replied, "Gods Kathryn, with you in there, I think it would be safer if I stayed out here all night." Her throaty laughter had stayed with him long after she had retired to her tiny bedroom, and it had been close to an hour before he had been able to calm himself enough to venture inside. In the stillness as he slipped naked beneath the sheets that night, even as exhausted as he was, he had spent at least another half an hour listening to her soft murmurs and sleep sounds before finally succumbing to sleep himself.

 

****

 

Now two days later, he stood frozen with terror for a moment at her bedroom door listening to her agonised weeping before rushing in without a thought for her privacy. 

 

"Kathryn!" he called anxiously as he entered, fully expecting to find her broken, bleeding body on the floor as a result of an accident during the storm. Instead, he found her flung across her bed, sobbing wildly and honestly like a child.

 

At the sound of his voice, she tore into his arms, almost knocking him backwards. He struggled to keep his balance, finally crashing down onto the bed with her still sobbing his name over and over as her hands fluttered over his body, as if to make sure all of him was real.  It was then that it hit him—that all of those tears had been for him. 

 

Her litany changed from his name to "You're safe" over and over as she continued to cry.  She really had been afraid for him, he realised as he tried to soothe her. The tearful words came tumbling out all at once as if she was afraid that he would disappear. 

 

"I looked everywhere for you, Chakotay! I couldn't find you—you didn't take a commbadge.  I searched all night, all morning—everywhere!  I thought something had happened to you, I was so afraid that something had happened to you, that I would never find you, that you were out there all alone and I would never find you again, Chakotay, that I wouldn't get to you in time."

 

Suddenly it wasn't only her hands exploring him, making sure he was real, her soft lips roamed his face, pressing ravenous kisses everywhere as she spoke until they found his mouth.  The passionate kisses were heady, frantic, hungry at first—wild and desperate to connect with him, as if to confirm that he was truly alive, but as the kisses softened and became more inviting, he felt a sudden wrongness about them and he looked down into her eyes again.  They were still frightened, wild and desperate, and he realised that she was confusing the torrent of relief she was feeling at his safe return for something far different from her fear.  Although pushing her away at that moment was among the hardest things he'd ever done, no matter what his aching body was telling him at the moment, he had to listen to what her soul was saying.  And it was telling him that she definitely was not ready for this. Not this way.

 

"Kathryn," he called gently, cupping her face and looking into her eyes as he broke the kiss.  "Kathryn, I'm all right.  I'm fine, and safe. Listen to me Kathryn, I'm safe."

 

"Yes, I know," she said with relief in her voice.  "You're safe."  She kissed him again passionately as she fumbled with the buttons of his shirt.

 

It took all his will power to push her away again and force himself to look into those gorgeous blue eyes, so frightened and needy.  "No," he said firmly and saw her chin tremble.  "It would be wrong to do this now, in this way Kathryn—you've had a terrible fright and you're just feeling relieved that I'm ok.  We can't do this."  It was as if there was some magic incantation in those words, the change in her was so swift, he’d barely had a moment to register it, much-less the time to figure out what was behind it.

 

"No, we can't do this," she repeated, quickly climbing out of his lap, but the tone of her voice, the finality of those words were what caught his attention and he knew instinctively that she hadn't meant them in the same way he had.  He caught her arms before she could escape and held her as she struggled like a frantic bird against him, confusing him more and more.  "I can't do this—not again, Chakotay," she cried hysterically.  "Not again, not again!  I can't go through this again!  I won't!"

 

She wrenched her wrists out of his grasp and ran sobbing from the room, leaving him stunned.  He didn't know what had gone wrong within those few fleeting seconds.  All he could comprehend was that the look in her eyes had gone instantly from frightened to something infinitely worse. It wasn't something that he could put his finger on, but he knew that it was something that he’d seen before—he didn't know where or when, but he knew he had, and he knew that fear couldn't even begin to describe it. 

 

It took him hours to understand what had frightened him about the way she had said those words.  She’d meant she was not going to pursue this relationship with him at all, and unless he could figure out what was going on with her, he knew that he didn't have an ice cube's chance in hell of sharing a life with her.  In the distance he heard the crackle of another plasma storm's fury building.

 

****

 

Chakotay didn't know how much more of the way Kathryn was acting he could take—it was as if the first five months of their lives on New Earth hadn't happened—as if less than one week before, she hadn't climbed into the tub naked with him. All those little things that had been bringing them closer together since the beginning of their life together were quickly buried, without reason or explanation.

 

He watched her now through the open door, diligently working through schematics for dozens of different designs of cloaking devices—the Starfleet decorum in place was such that not even the Captain Janeway he'd known on Voyager at her most unyielding, had ever possessed.  He'd tried time after time to get her to talk to him about what had frightened her so badly, but each time had felt as if he had come up against ten-metre thick duratanium bulkhead.  She barely ate or slept now, all she seemed to do was work, but without the sense of optimism or accomplishment he was accustomed to from her. The strained formality was stifling him and he found that he could barely stand to be in the same room with her for more than five minutes at a time—well he was damned if he was going to give up without a fight.  He took a deep breath and went inside. 

 

"Kathryn, we have to talk about us," he said curtly and she looked up at him tiredly.

 

"No we don't, Chakotay," she replied in that same implacable voice she had been using all week.  "Look, I've already apologised I don't know how many times for leading you on, for being as you eloquently put it—a tease!  How many more times do I have to keep saying I'm sorry, but there is no _us_?"

 

"Until you can say it so many times that it becomes the truth!" he hissed through clenched teeth.  "Because as far as I'm concerned the past five months—those were the truth; the past two years—those were the truth.  These past five days are the travesties—the lies!  And nothing you can say would convince me otherwise."

 

"Are you so sure about that?" she replied angrily.  "Well don't be—because what you see as the truth were simply lies in another form!  Perhaps you should learn to tell the difference before you start preaching to me."  He stared at her in shock; no matter what he said, she always managed to twist his words into something vile.

 

She rose in a fury, toppling her chair as she made for the door and he caught her hand as she tried to move past him.  "And was Captain Janeway a lie too?" he asked softly.

 

She gave a harsh bitter laugh as she wrenched her hand away.  "She was the biggest lie of all, Chakotay. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going for a walk," she said as she pushed past him."

 

"You can go straight to hell for all I care," he sneered contemptuously.

 

The expression froze on his face as she turned to him and fixed him with the cruellest smile he'd ever seen on another person's face. "Yeah well, that road is a whole lot shorter than you think, Chakotay—so see you there."

 

He leaned against the doorway, physically exhausted and drained from that short battle.  It wasn't supposed to be like this, he didn't want to fight with her every time he saw her, but invariably he did and each time they destroyed a little more of that special bond he felt was between them.  Now he began to doubt that that bond ever existed in the first place. He watched her disappear into the forest and his Father's words from that afternoon rose unbidden in his mind. 

 

"Why do you need her to tell you what is wrong, Chakotay?" Dream Father had continued to carve a small wooden flute, unperturbed by his son's obvious agitation.

 

"Because I don't know where to start looking—I don't know what I'm looking for."

 

"Why not start with what you do know?" Kolopak had asked logically. He held out the unfinished flute for him to see.  "What is this, Chakotay?"

 

"A flute."

 

The old man had shaken his head in disappointment.  "Are you sure?"

 

"Of course I'm sure," he'd returned in annoyance.  "You blow in that end and the music comes out the other."

 

"When have you heard music come from this thing?"

 

"Well, I haven't heard this one," he'd answered in frustration. "But I've heard countless others just like it—it is simply a flute."

 

"Then all flutes are like this."  Kolopak had turned the instrument over in his hands to show the backside.  An ugly, gaping crack ran down the back.

 

Chakotay had looked at him in confusion.  "Why would you carve a damaged flute—one that couldn't possibly play music?  What is the use of that?"

 

"And I ask again, how do you know this is a flute, Chakotay? When have you ever heard it's music, seen it played?  How do you know what use it has?  Why are you so quick to discard it, Chakotay?"  He'd watched his father take a small piece of fine sandpaper and lovingly sand the mouthpiece.  Kolopak had looked up sadly again as the Dream plane began to dissolve.  "What is this, Chakotay?"

 

"A piece of wood," Chakotay answered now in comprehension. "A piece of wood." He realised that he'd been making a lot of assumptions about Kathryn based on all the other women he'd known in his past, but what did he really know about the person Kathryn Janeway beyond the fact that she embodied the form of a woman.  The most desirable woman to him—that was certain, but who was she beyond that woman.  Captain Janeway?  No, she was simply the smooth carved front of the flute with every hole, and every little flourish in its place.

 

"Why not start with what you know?" 

 

He took a padd from his desk drawer and made his way to his bedroom. As he lay across his bed, he began to tap in all the information he knew about Kathryn Janeway.

 

Father: Admiral Edward Janeway; scientist, engineer, starship designer.

Mother: Dr. Gretchen Janeway; mathematician, scientist.

Sister: Phoebe Janeway; artist.

Lover: Mark ? philosopher, childhood friend.

 

They had talked a little more about Mark, but now Chakotay couldn't remember his last name.  He had been someone Kathryn had known all her life—a friendship that had eventually blossomed into love—Johnson, he remembered now, Mark Hobbes Johnson.

 

Best friend: Tuvok of Vulcan; tactical officer, advisor, mentor.

Age: forty-one, birthday May 20.

Occupation: Starfleet Captain, scientist.

 

He looked up again, wondering why she had streamed into the command track after training to be a hard core science officer.  He remembered her saying that Paris' father had encouraged her to try for command and had recommended her to Command School, but he didn't know what had motivated her to do it.  It probably had a lot to do with that need for control of hers. Her parents had no doubt had a lot to do with her decision to become a scientist, but what made her decide to become a starship captain. 

 

She had entered the Academy some twenty-odd years before, about the same time he had, but he'd always been in the command track—trained as a pilot and a team leader. Had he been aware of her back then?  He decided he hadn't, but he found it funny to think that he might have stood behind her in a line at the Academy mess hall all those years ago, without knowing that she was the woman he would end up spending the rest of his life with.  He knew a little of how she had distinguished herself as she moved up the ranks, but he felt sure that what ever it was that had a stranglehold on her right now was personal and had little to do with her Starfleet career.  If it did, he could always come back to it.  He looked down at his pitiful list in angry frustration.  This couldn't be all he knew about her!

 

"Who are you Kathryn Janeway?" he whispered aloud.  He knew more about her bloody dogs than he did about her. 

 

_Her dogs!_ he thought in excitement.  Her constant companions almost her entire life. Mr. Tuggles, a gentle, gigantic, unchanging, unconditional ball of fur from since babyhood, loved and trusted without question.  He'd probably been with her parents long before she was born, but as with any child, he'd probably become her exclusive domain as soon as she was old enough to understand the concept of "mine". 

 

He chuckled softly at the image that conjured up—of a two year old Kathryn rolling in the grass with the enormous St. Bernard.  Then there was Bramble, a little bundle of love to soak up the tears of childhood and lick clean the wounds of growing up so they could heal properly.  He'd died just before she entered the Academy and then she'd been dogless while she'd pursued her career until Petunia came into her life—"on a cold winter's day" when she hadn't been sure that life was worth living. 

 

Those had been her words and one of the only indications he'd had of a darker side to her past.  What had happened to her then and what did it have to do with the way she was acting now? Suicide?  A cold chill ran through him—no, he couldn’t even imagine Kathryn thinking about something like that.

 

"I can't go through this again!  Not again!  Not again!" Her hysterical words bombarded him over and over— What was she so frightened of?  The road to hell was a lot shorter than he thought. He saw those cruel, dead eyes looking back at him as he reviewed their last fight. 

 

For the past week, he'd been terrified of those eyes—the eyes he finally remembered seeing in those members of the Marquis who had seen too much death, the ones who volunteered for the suicide missions and never came back. How far on the road to hell had she travelled?

 

He remembered the bundle of mud-stained clothes in the corner of her tiny room and her words to him when she realised he was safe.  She'd searched all night for him in the wind and the rain and he could imagine her frantic cries as she fought the elements. Her tricorder would have been useless beyond a meter or two during a plasma storm.  She loved him, she'd been afraid he'd been hurt out there all alone where she couldn't find him—or worse, that he'd died, leaving her alone on this deserted world. 

 

He cursed his thoughtlessness, but it was more than just this incident—it had happened before, but to whom?  She had been on this road to hell before; the question was whom had she lost along the way?

 

He looked down again at his list—Mark.  Well she certainly had lost him or rather he had been lost to her, but he wasn't dead—at least not as far as she knew for certain.  But she would probably never see him again. His loss had been devastating to her, but she had been able to handle it.  Although he had never been privy to her private grief those first months after she'd destroyed the Array, he was sure that the loss of Mark was simply another knife to open an old wound the way he'd done five days ago.

 

He didn't know anything about her other lovers, but that wasn't surprising, he hadn't talked about his past lovers either.  Ironically, the one that he considered to be his worst mistake—and he'd certainly made enough of those—but the only one she knew about was Seska, the biggest monument to bad judgement he could possibly find.

 

Her father?  Kathryn's mother and sister were still alive, but when had her father died? How had he died? Chakotay padded over to the seldom-used console in the corner of his room.  Until now, he'd preferred to use the one in the living room, even for recording his daily logs—because she was usually there beside him.

 

Vice Admiral Edward Janeway; deceased December 28, 2355—sixteen years before—an accidental death.  Kathryn would have been on her first starship mission with Admiral Paris on the _Icarus_ if he remembered correctly.  He pulled up her service record and looked at it in surprise, she'd officially left Paris' command December 4 th—three weeks before her father's death.  Her next official record entry was for Command School training from April to September 2356.

 

So she hadn't been on the _Icarus_ when he'd died—wait a minute.  He peered at the dates again. Command School usually ran for six months from January to June, and from July to December, yet her records showed a gap of three months. Chakotay knew all about Starfleet records— _everything_ was recorded, even if it was just three months spent collecting moon rocks in the Sea of Tranquility, and even if she was allowed a few days to mourn her father's death, the latest she would have started was mid-January.  She would have still been registered officially for the January to June term.  He tried to access more details on Edward Janeway's death, but all he came up with was the dry Starfleet obituary.

 

Vice Admiral Edward Janeway died December 28, 2355 at the age of 58, in an accident on board the _USS Terra Nova_ on manoeuvres around Tau Ceti Prime.  He is survived by...  Chakotay banged the desk in frustration.  He tried to access the details of the accident on board the _Terra Nova_ for that date and came up blank—in fact the last Starfleet ship he could find with that name had been destroyed over a century before.  He'd found six other contemporary ships with that name or something close to it that were privately owned, but four of them hadn't even been built at the time of the accident while the other two didn't seem remotely connected in any way.  In any case, civilian ships wouldn't carry the USS designation—that honour was strictly reserved for Starfleet ships.

 

Chakotay scrubbed at his eyes tiredly— _damn Starfleet and their bloody secrecy_. After a moment, he stared back at the computer screen—the Starfleet database might not tell him anything, but what about the civilian database, with all its business, culture, politics, gossip and current events.  The only question was how much of that database had been downloaded into their computer—certainly it would have included everything from the last century or so from Earth. Kathryn came from a small, traditional community in Indiana, Cartersville—what passed for a small town in this era.  He remembered her complaining about having to learn traditional things like tennis when she would have rather played Parissees Squares. 

 

Her father would have been an important man, or at the very least well known in that community—and a traditional town like Cartersville would most likely have—yes it did, a community newsnet.  The Cartersville Herald, the equivalent of the local daily newspaper and he smiled as he found Edward Janeway's obituary.  His face fell as he read short, sensitively written passage with a pounding heart.  He understood now why he couldn't find any references to the _Terra Nova_. It had been a prototype ship of the Admiral's own design.  One particular paragraph caught his attention and he had to read it again to make sure he'd understood it correctly. 

 

"This accident is all the more tragic, coming so soon after the happy announcement in the Herald on December 15th, of the impending marriage of Admiral Janeway's eldest daughter, Ensign Kathryn Janeway, to Lieutenant Justin Tighe, who was also reported killed in the crash.  Ensign Janeway is reported to be in stable but critical condition at Mittern Station."

 

He continued to stare at the screen in shock, oblivious to the tears streaming down his face.  Not only had she lost her father, she'd lost her husband to be in the same blow—worse, she'd been in the accident.  She had survived and they'd died.  Chakotay called up the conditions of Tau Ceti Prime.  It was nothing but one giant ball of ice. What had happened during that accident? 

 

Finally, he brought up the wedding announcement.  A sob caught in his throat as he saw the picture of the beautiful, spirited, happy young woman in the arms of the more serious-eyed, but undoubtedly happy young man who appeared to be about thirty. The love in her eyes was undeniable and Chakotay's heart ached at how young she looked.

 

"Vice Admiral Edward Janeway and Dr. Gretchen Janeway, are happy to announce the impending marriage of their eldest daughter Ensign Kathryn Janeway, to Lieutenant Justin Tighe on July 10, 2356."

 

Her father, Justin, Mark.  Chakotay knew that she'd also been engaged to marry Mark for about a year before Voyager was taken and that they'd been lovers for more than five years. Mark had been a safe choice, a philosopher—she’d been the one with the dangerous job. No one could have foreseen that she would be brutally separated from him, thrown into this bizarre situation where he might as well be dead, but wasn't. 

 

Now there was him—Chakotay.  The only other soul on this entire planet, both suffering from a disease they had no idea what the long-term consequences were and facing a world of unknown dangers. Six nights ago, he didn't come home. The world had been torn apart by forces she couldn't control and she couldn't find him, her voice drowned out by the wind and the rain and the plasma surges.  That long, wet night had simply been an inconvenience for him, and moment after agonising moment of complete terror for her. _Terra Nova_ , New Earth—an amazing coincidence, which had he known, he never would have chosen it for the name of this wretched world.

 

He heard a soft rustling from her room and glanced at his chronometer—it was 22:30 hours. He'd spent all evening in his room, forgotten about fixing dinner, helping out with the chores or prepping for the trip to collect trialurite ore samples from the eastern mountain range.  He stepped out of his alcove and surveyed the living room. There was a covered plate on the table and a neat pile of sample cases and mining gear by the door. He covered the few steps to her door quickly and knocked gently.  "Kathryn, may I come in?"

 

"Yes." He found her standing in the middle of her room in that heavy Vulcan robe, her hairbrush in hand, and the soft waves of hair framing her stern face.  "What do you want?" she asked in mild annoyance.

 

Chakotay met her eyes without anger for the first time in days. "Only to tell you that I'm not your father, I'm not Justin and I'm not Mark—" 

 

He only had a second to catch her as her legs gave away and she knocked everything off her dressing table clinging to it for support.  He gathered her up in his arms and sat on the bed, holding her until those terrible shudders passed. 

 

"I wish I could promise that I won't die or be taken from you like they were, but I can't Kathryn."  He waited for her loud sobbing to quieten before continuing.  "I have nothing to offer but love. I can’t take away your fears or make the past go away.  All I can do here and now, is offer you my love.  If you take it and when you take it is up to you Kathryn, it's up to you.  My love is there for the asking—it will always be there."

 

****

 

 

Kathryn woke as the body below her shifted slightly into another position. She raised her head from his chest and looked down into Chakotay's sleeping face.  Bright sunlight streamed through her window, marking the lateness of the day, revealing the exhaustion in his face and the dark smudges beneath his eyes.  A flood of intense emotion swept over her as she laid her head back on his chest.

 

She had done that to him—selfishly shut him out, left him bewildered and wondering what he'd done wrong, what he had done to harm her when in actual fact he'd done nothing wrong, done nothing to hurt her.  But she had hurt him badly with her words and scorn—doing anything she could to keep him from burrowing any deeper into her soul and as always, not caring how much of him she destroyed, as long as she could not be hurt, nothing else mattered.

 

Yet, somehow he had been able to pick through all that emotional garbage and debris she had thrown in his way and found the truth.  He hadn't blamed her, become angry or told her that he understood what she had done and why she had done it.  Sometimes, she didn't even understand why she did this—but even so she felt he had understood.

 

_I'm not your father, I'm not Justin and I'm not Mark._

_I wish I could promise that I won't die or be taken from you like they were, but I can't Kathryn._

_I have nothing to offer but love._

_I can’t take your fears away or make the past go away._

_All I can do here and now, is offer you my love._

_My love is there for the asking—it will always be there._

 

A tear for each healing word he'd spoken to her soaked into his shirt. She felt him gently stroke her hair.  "I'm sorry, Chakotay," she whispered.

 

"I know," he replied simply.  He cupped her chin and forced her to look into his eyes.  "But we have to talk, Kathryn."

 

She nodded tearfully as she answered him, "Yes." She laid her head on his shoulder and continued to sob softly as he gathered her closer to him. As she regained her control, a low rumbling sound caught her attention— _his stomach was growling!_ She couldn't help the laughter that bubbled up from inside and he met her eyes in confusion.

 

"Now what is so funny?"

 

She had to take a deep breath to steady herself before she could answer. "Your stomach, Chakotay—it's growling!" she managed before dissolving into gales of laughter again.

 

He joined her hilarity and she could hear the relief in his voice. "Well what do you expect woman!  I had no dinner yesterday, a wretched lunch, missed breakfast this morning and it's almost noon," he griped.  "You're lucky I haven't eaten you—"

 

He must have caught the look in her eyes, because he blushed beneath his tan. She pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lips and looked deep into his eyes.  "Not yet love," she whispered.  She continued to look into his eyes, to let him know that she was not simply flirting—taking fast, hard snipes then retreating back into safety.

 

Again he understood, her promise, her permission.  He met her lips in another gentle kiss, then hugged her tightly to him before releasing her.  His lips curled into an embarrassed smile.  "I hate to break this up, but nature calls."

 

She laughed and crawled out from on top him.  As he stood, she went up on her toes to kiss him again. "I'll make the coffee," she said as his hand lingered in her hair for a moment before he ducked out of the room.

 

#

 

Part 3: Of Flute Song and Harp Strings

 

 

"We'll be landing in fifteen minutes," Chakotay called, looking over his shoulder to where Kathryn sat on the floor analysing a sample of ore.

 

He could feel her excitement as she looked up and flashed him a radiant smile. "This particular vein is even more pure than I suspected," she commented eagerly before being caught up in her readings again.

 

He chuckled and turned back to his display, leaving her to enjoy herself—the trip had been delayed over a week, but it had been worth it. He could have easily left the shuttle on auto-pilot and gone back to enjoy her company, but that whole episode with her had taught him a valuable lesson about carelessness and taking unnecessary chances.  His entire future—all his hopes and dreams were wrapped up in this thin shell of metal and energy. That had been part of what had frightened her so much about starting a relationship with him. Each embodied the other's hope for the future. 

 

They’d spent nearly a week teaching each other about themselves, their lives before they met and the people who had meant so much to them, who had shaped and moulded them.  When they’d finally got around to discussing the accident, it had been a lot worse than he'd imagined.  Kathryn had actually watched helplessly as they died.  She had tried to save them both because she couldn't choose one and had lost them both. 

 

Technology had failed her then and it had failed here—first in not being able to find a cure for the disease they carried and again that night when she could not find him, could not rescue him from the elements which could have destroyed him so easily.  Chakotay found the parallels uncanny, but—even beyond that—their entire situation was enough to frighten anyone.  In the end, all he could do was hold her as she relived those terrifying minutes of anguish alone on the frozen waste as her father and Justin died again in her memory.

 

He deftly piloted the shuttle into its customary spot at the side of the house and laughed as a shower of small objects rained down on the roof and forward viewport.  "What was that about?" she asked as he finished the shutdown sequence.

 

She was already shouldering the sample cases when he joined her. "Curious George and his buddies taking issue with my piloting skills," he laughed. "Well at least I won't have to climb that darned blacknut tree to get enough to make bread in the morning."

 

She chuckled softly as they exited the shuttle.  "They're just welcoming us home," she said, then winced as one bounced off her head and shook her fist at the tree full of primates.  "Or not!" she complained.

 

"Are you up for a swim?" he asked dropping the mining gear in a corner by the door.

 

"Umm. Just the thing after a hard day's work," she answered enthusiastically.  "And we've got more than four hours of daylight left."

 

Chakotay left her to store the samples to her satisfaction and went to change into his swimming trunks.  "What do you want for dinner?" he called as he heard her moving around in her bedroom.

 

"Don't we have that roasted brownie hen left over?" she returned, her voice slightly muffled.

 

"Yes, but I thought you'd be tired of poultry three days in a row."

 

Kathryn laughed as he entered the living room to wait for her. "We might as well get it over with.  Now that we know that the meat is as dense as Bolian turkey, we won't cook so many next time—four was a bit much."

 

"Hey, what is this “we” stuff?" he teased.  "And how was I supposed to know?  The damned little pests are the size of Cornish game hens. It looks like they've been in the tomatoes again today."

 

He whistled appreciatively as she entered wearing the high-cut, black swimsuit and she batted her lashes flirtatiously as she slipped on her shoes and followed him out.  "I was thinking," she began thoughtfully as they walked down the path.  "With winter coming up, although it's likely to be relatively mild this far south, we should seriously consider putting up a greenhouse."  He looked at her in astonishment and then smiled.  She must really be starting to accept the fact that they most likely would be on the planet for the long haul to suggest something as permanent as a greenhouse.  "It would take care of our fresh vegetable needs and do away with the problem of our tomato thieves."

 

He nodded in agreement.  "It would also be easier to cloak two defined structures instead of an open field. The cloaking emitters could be built into the frame or at least mounted on it. Have you decided on the design you want to use?" he asked stepping into the water and immediately crouching to wet his entire body.

 

"Until this morning I had," she answered as she waded out to him. "Something along the lines of a Romulan cloak seemed best—but with this grade of trialurite ..." She regarded him seriously and he could see her quick mind running through the pros and cons of her various options.  "What do you think of a phased cloak."

 

"Phased cloaks are dangerous Kathryn," he replied after a moment as the concept sank in—he definitely hadn't been expecting this.  "If we're not careful, we can phase ourselves right out of this reality.  There would also be no possibility of raising a shield."

 

"I know, but the advantage would be that someone could walk right over the spot where our house stands and find nothing but a strange, bare patch of ground.  It would also be less taxing on the power-grid which would have to sustain a shield as well as a cloak with the conventional system."  He nodded as she continued.  "I can have the plans for the basic, no frills device ready in about two and a half months, but I'm fairly certain we can have phased cloak within six months."

 

Chakotay smiled at her and pulled her to him.  "Well then, why don't we go for it?"  She grinned and kissed him before he continued. "The only thing that would make it perfect is if we could find some way to rig up a long-range early warning system, so that we could cloak before anyone gets close enough to investigate.  The shuttle's passive sensors are fine for warning us of someone coming into orbit, but I'd rather know that they were coming long before they got that far."

 

"I know," she replied.  "I can't think of any way around that at the moment—we'd have to leave the planet to do it."

 

He held her close again and traced her lips with one finger as she wrapped her legs around his hips.  "Don't worry, I have complete faith in you," he whispered and kissed her deeply again.  His desire mounted as he felt each delicious contour of her wet body torment him and laughed nervously as they broke the kiss.  "Gods, Kathryn," he gasped.  "How the hell do you manage to do that to me everytime?"

 

"Whatever do you mean, Chakotay?" she asked coyly as she slid slowly, agonisingly down his front and paddled away with a Cheshire cat smile. He laughed and started after her, hoping that the exercise and the water would cool him off, but he had no doubt that she had felt the evidence of his desire for her.  Sometimes, especially at night, it seemed to him that they were moving entirely too slowly, but he was content to wait until she was ready.

 

****

 

 

"Kathryn, it's time you got some sleep," Chakotay said looking at her from the threshold of his bedroom.  She had been working almost non-stop on the schematics for the cloaking device for the last week, while he had been constructing the frame for the greenhouse. The native wood he had been using was strong, but after putting it through the molecular bonding process he'd jury-rigged, the termites would need jaws of neosteel to chew through it. She was right, anything technological and she was in her element—she had slowed her research on the virus, but hadn't stopped.  He got the feeling she was feeling a little guilty because she liked working on the cloak a lot more.

 

She waved him away absently.  "I'll go in a minute, Chakotay—I just have to integrate the Tarok lines to optimise the field refraction density," she replied automatically without lifting her eyes from the console.

 

He moved over to the desk and put his hand on her shoulder, "Kathryn, it's nearly one in the morning and you've been going since 06:00. The equations can wait a few hours."

 

She covered his hand briefly and smiled up at him before saving the file and turning the console off.  "All right," she laughed.  "You win, but the Tarok lines can be made fifteen percent more efficient with this integration series."  She winced as she stood and reached reflexively for the back of her neck.

 

"Your knots have knots?" he asked smiling at their private joke as she nodded.  "Why don't you go lie down and I'll be in to fix it.  See what comes of spending so many hours hunched over the computer?"

 

"Yes doctor," she quipped and disappeared.

 

Chakotay smiled to himself as he collected his massage oil and a towel. Entering her room, he stopped short in surprise.  Usually she would lie on the bed with her arms out of the straps of her nightgown, but tonight she lay under the thin sheet, the nightgown she'd been wearing draped provocatively across the foot of the bed.

 

"Kathryn?" His voice was soft—needing to be sure there was no misunderstanding.  Their eyes met and she lifted the edge of the sheet. There was definitely no misunderstanding as he assimilated his first sight of her naked body. He gave a soft chuckle and placed the massage oil on the dresser, then bent to kiss her passionately.

 

Chakotay hadn't thought it possible for him to feel more deeply for her, but as their mouths explored one another, he quickly realised just how wrong he'd been about that.  He felt her hands at the waistband of his pants he had hastily donned when he'd awakened to find that he'd dozed off and she was still at the computer.  He straightened as she sat up and pulled the pants down past his hips.  The sheet had slipped down to her waist, and he groaned as she pressed soft, tantalising kisses at his navel before moving down to the mass of black curls beneath.

 

She pulled away and looked up into his eyes with a bewitching little smile. He quickly shucked his pants and climbed onto the narrow bed as she moved to accommodate his larger frame. As she brought her hand down to stroke his erection, he removed it quickly and used it to fondle her own breast. "Oh no you don't, Kathryn," he laughed softly.  "You do way too much damage to my self control.  Just give me a little time." 

 

He guided his fingers into her silky mass of curls to explore the soft, plump lips there and grinned as he kissed her—she was definitely a natural redhead. "We have all the time in the world Kathryn," he whispered as he slipped a finger into her wet, narrow passage and her eyes went wide as his thumb manipulated her tender, little bud.

 

"Yes," she responded hoarsely, throwing her arms around his neck and arching her hips to make closer contact with his hand.  "Oh yes!" 

 

Kathryn moaned loudly, throwing her head back as he slipped a second finger into her.  He looked at her in wonder of her uninhibited, passionate response as her cries took on a higher pitch. She moved one leg to circle his waist, trapping his hand between them, then clamping her mouth over his, she rode his fingers hard towards her volcanic release.

 

****

 

Kathryn heard him whisper her name through the haze of her orgasm-dulled senses and smiled as she brought his face into focus.  She could see the mild concern in his eyes as he caressed her damp cheek with one hand and cradled her tenderly in the other arm.

 

"I'm fine Chakotay," she answered, capturing his hand and kissing his fingertips.  "It's just that—" She hesitated for a moment, feeling the warm, embarrassed glow spread beneath her skin.  "It's just that I haven't done this in such a long time," she finished, sheepishly meeting his eyes.  She knew that she'd never exactly been the quietest of lovers, but she also never remembered being so frantic or loud—never been so demanding with her needs before she was satisfied, and crying until she was.

 

"I'm sorry I haven't exactly been thoughtful about your needs, your pleasures, Chakotay," she apologised softly.  He'd already brought her to orgasm three times and she had yet to touch him, to reciprocate.

 

He chuckled as he gently stroked her breasts and lowered his head to kiss her.  "You don't think you've brought me pleasure?" he whispered hoarsely, as the slow fire began to burn again in her core as his hand roamed her body.  "Oh Kathryn, how can you say that? How can you not know?" He clasped her hand tightly as he continued, the love shining in his eyes.  "I've never met anyone like you Kathryn, so honest, so full of life and love—I've never made a woman cry before with just a gentle touch. Thank you," he whispered kissing her hand.

 

She lay for a moment just basking in his love and his praise, before deftly rolling on top of him and straddling his waist.  "You're welcome, Chakotay," she answered in her most seductive voice.  "But I hope you will allow me to extend a proper welcome," she said reaching back and stroking his erect shaft without breaking eye contact.  He gave a sharp intake of breath and then an incoherent groan as she teased him and he reached up to grasp her breasts with both hands. She moved her hand away slowly and lowered her head to his.  "I'll take that as a yes," she said hoarsely and crushed his mouth to hers.

 

She felt him move to roll her beneath him and broke the kiss, sat up again and reached back to stroke the heavy sacs and solid erection.  She grinned as he writhed beneath her and she extracted another wrenching groan before beginning a torturous journey with her tongue, starting with a slow laving of his nipples, licking and nibbling them erect before moving down his body, dragging her breasts across his skin. He gasped as she licked the dense black curls and ran a gentle finger up the underside of his shaft, feeling every vein and cord of powerful muscle before kissing the satiny, engorged tip. His fingers tangled in her hair and she could hear his ragged breathing as she drew him into her mouth and began to slowly move up and down, taking him in as deeply as she could.

 

A few moments later, she heard him cry raggedly, "Kathryn, you have to stop.  I can't hold on."

 

She moved her mouth away, but continue to stroke him as she met his eyes. He was propped up one elbow, while the other hand still tangled in her hair.  "Then let go," she purred and he groaned loudly. "We have plenty of time," she said and lowered her head again to lick his heavy sacs as her hand continued to manipulate his thick shaft.  It was as she kissed and tongued her way to its apex, that she heard him cry out her name and as his control broke, she gave a joyful laugh.

 

****

 

 

Kathryn cried out loudly as he entered her, but it was quickly muffled when his tongue thrust into her mouth at almost the same moment.  She'd expected him to take a while to regain his erection after his first explosive orgasm, but to her delight he'd never lost it and once he came to his senses, he'd quickly caught her by the waist and flipped her beneath him, much to her surprise. 

 

After his initial thrust, he'd stopped for a moment for her to accommodate him, then slowly pushed in as deeply as he could.  She gasped as the pleasure and the pressure mounted, and began to move in tandem with his slow thrusts.  She whispered his name over and over, an erotic litany that heightened her pleasure—every time he touched the depths of her soul. She met his eyes through a veil of tears as his rhythm sped up and whispered, "I love you." His expressive eyes widened and he pulled her to him, before both were swept away and drowned in a deluge of pure emotion. 

 

And it was at that moment she made her silent vow to him.

 

****

 

 

"Kathryn, can I ask you a personal question?"  She lay on her stomach—padds scattered around her on the blanket they had spread by the river.  It had been four days since they had become lovers and the first time that they had spent any significant time away from the house and it's immediate surroundings.  He didn't know how they were ever going to be able to get any work done in the foreseeable future when he could barely keep his hands off her for more than a few minutes.

 

She lifted her head from the cradle of her arms, her hair glowing like polished copper in the sunshine and fixed him with a saucy gaze over her shoulder. "Well I should hope so," she answered tartly.  "Considering what your hands are doing at the moment."

 

He gave her a devilish grin and looked down again at the pale mounds of her backside he was currently kneading gently.  They contrasted erotically with his tanned fingers and she gave a small gasp as he lowered his lips to bestow a kiss on each hemisphere. A few minutes before, distracted by her demurely covered presence beside him, he'd put down the padd with the schematics for the greenhouse ventilation system, which he'd been studying in frustration. But she had kept working, seemingly unaware of his condition.

 

And she had continued to ignore him when he'd playfully lifted back the hem of her powder blue dress over her waist.  It was only after he'd pulled her peach lace panties down to the tops of her thighs, that she'd dropped her padds and moaned.  A gentle finger between her legs told him that she had been more than ready, but he'd been content to just play with her for a while.

 

Her responsiveness both delighted and amazed him—he'd expected a passionate woman behind that buttoned down captain's exterior, but nothing in his wildest, most fevered imaginings had led him to expect this degree of passion, or this strange blend of sophistication and innocence.  Kathryn Janeway was definitely an adult woman who knew what she wanted and how to achieve it, as well as being able to drive a man out of his mind with pleasure.  However, she was curiously ignorant of just how unique and alluring she was, as well as some of the most basic techniques and sex games most Starfleet cadets learned in their first year, although she had been more than enthusiastic about repairing that hole in her education.

 

"I was wondering about your other lovers," he said gently and she gave him a bewildered look as she turned over and sat up.  "I mean that we haven't talked about anyone besides Mark and Justin."  To his surprise, she blushed deep scarlet to her roots and broke eye contact. He watched in confusion as her discomfort increased and she fidgeted nervously with her dress and hair. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," he hastened to calm her obvious distress. "I realise that when we talked, we just discussed the important, defining people in our lives—"

 

"It isn't that," she said in a low, hoarse voice and closed her eyes as her cheeks flamed an even deeper red.

 

"Then what is it?" he asked anxiously, wondering what in heaven she could find so embarrassing.

 

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath as she faced him. "The reason I haven't told you of any others, is because there haven't been any others Chakotay," she said in a soft voice.

 

Chakotay looked at her in astonishment—completely flabbergasted—certain that he hadn't heard correctly, but knowing that he had.  She gave him a weak smile as he tried to assimilate that piece information.  She was a beautiful, passionate, forty-one year old woman!  He hadn't expected her to have a man in every port, although he wouldn't have been surprised or judged her if she had, but he certainly hadn't been expecting her to say that she'd only been with two other men in her entire life besides him. 

 

Gods, she was practically a virgin!  Justin had been in her life for less than a year over fifteen years ago, Mark as a lover seven years ago—when they had celebrated her captain's pips. There hadn't been anyone on Voyager, no one in over two years, but what about the time between Mark and Justin, her years at the Academy—high school for crying out loud!  He had barely known what to do with himself during those crazy, hormone-driven years.  He realised that his silence was making her more uncomfortable and cast about for something to say. 

 

"Do you mind telling me just how you managed that Kathryn?" She folded her arms across her chest and fixed him with a sour look.  "I didn't mean to sound judgmental—"

 

"But you find it strange," she finished softly, looking out over the river.

 

"No," he began quickly.  "Well yes," he amended, turning her to face him.  He gave her a quizzical half smile. "It's just that I was thinking that by the time I got out of high school, I'd already gone through three girlfriends—or rather, three girls had already gone through me!"

 

She grinned and leaned forward to kiss him gently.  "I suppose it is rather strange in this day and age," she said wistfully.  "I guess I just never really noticed it until about ten years ago—or rather had it pointed out to me."

 

"Pointed out to you?" he asked curiously.

 

She laughed heartily and shook her head.  "Yes, in no uncertain terms by my sister Phoebe. She had set me up with one of her friends to escort me to some admiral's party."  She gave him a wry look as she continued. "I suppose we hit it off ok. We had a few dates before I had to ship out again, but apparently he had been expecting more than a kiss good night and thanks for a nice time. After seeing each other for a couple of weeks, he'd thought he was being entirely reasonable in expecting more from me—not that he tried to force anything, he just thought it the natural thing to happen and thought it strange, or rather thought me strange. But in my eyes, besides the party, we'd only had four or five dates—hardly something to base a lasting relationship on, not realising that he wasn't looking for a lasting relationship."

 

She supported her head on one hand as she lay on her side facing him. "I guess that casual sex was just never something I felt comfortable with.  I mean I like to have fun—who doesn't—but it always seemed that having sex with someone whom I didn't have any emotional investment in, whom I didn't even know, much less know if I liked, was wrong—pointless in a way. Not that I mean that people who do are wrong," she continued quickly. "Just that it was wrong for me. I guess that I needed to know that I loved the man I was giving myself to and that he loved me."

 

He looked at her shy expression in amazement and chuckled softly as he kissed her. "I think I can understand that," he said.  "But didn't your sister?"

 

"I don't know—not really, or not fully in any case.  Phoebe just couldn't understand how I could be so inhibited when we'd practically had the same upbringing."  Kathryn laughed softly.  "After all she was the one who came down to breakfast with a boy one morning when she was sixteen, blithely announced that she'd just had sex and could Daddy please pass the sugar." 

 

Chakotay sputtered and coughed as he dissolved into a puddle of laughter.

 

"Our father nearly had an apoplectic fit, but Mom took the cake. All she said was that's nice dear and then asked Phoebe if she'd had a good time and the young man what he wanted for breakfast.  Well, Phoebe stormed out with the boy in tow, ranting that no one cared about her—and all this while my father had yet to say a word.  When he finally recovered his powers of speech, he yelled at mom Mom asking what she meant by letting her go off like that, but she'd just laughed at him and scolded him for allowing Phoebe to be able to get the better of him so easily.  She knew that Phoebe was just trying to shock them, and in any case, if she’d really had sex the night before, there was little Dad could do about it the morning after—it was not like he could order the two little idiots to undo it."

 

Kathryn laughed again, eyes twinkling as she continued.  "But when Phoebe really did have sex for the first time about a year later, that was a different story.  She spent the day after crying into our mother's lap, while I ran interference and took our Dad out for the day.  I doubt if Daddy ever knew that it had happened. Poor Phoebe.  I remember asking her what went wrong, but nothing had—she just went in with so many first time expectations, and she'd still been too immature at seventeen.  She said that she hadn't expected it to be so final or the change in her to be so irrevocable.  Anyway, ten years ago, I suppose her friend complained, because she told me that I really should get over these irrational inhibitions of mine and that it was just plain unnatural for me to have only had two lovers at my age."

 

"Wait a minute," Chakotay said in confusion.  "Ten years ago you weren't involved with Mark yet."

 

"I know," she said laughing.  "Phoebe was just about as shocked as you were to find out that Justin had been my first, my only one to that point—probably more so. She nearly went through the roof when she found out that she'd been sexually active for over six years before I'd started, and I'm four years older.  She'd thought that Cheb Packer—the boy I went out with for two years until I entered the Academy—had been my first."

 

"Why wasn't he?" Chakotay asked softly.

 

"He almost was," Kathryn answered thoughtfully.  "But we broke up the day I had been planning to be our first time.  We got back together and broke up twice after that, but never did get around to making love," she finished with a grin.  "I was rather a late bloomer," she explained.  "I didn't even need a bra until I was almost seventeen.  Cheb was a handsome devil—still is.  He's a diplomat now, a good career choice for him—Mark always said he was a silver-tongued salesman. 

 

“He was rather like Tom Paris, a charismatic rogue and he made my heart race. He also scared me half to death. He just sort of came out of left field and ambushed me with a whole load of feelings that left me dizzy. It took me months to sort myself out in that relationship.  Before that boys were pals, friends, sparring partners, they took my friends out—even asked me for advice on one girl or another—but never asked me out. I found out later it also worried my mother that I never really took an interest in them."

 

She smiled nostalgically.  "But there I was, Cheb made me feel like a desirable woman, even though I wasn't sure I was one and I can honestly say that it was wonderful for the most part until the last six months or so.  I'd been accepted to the Academy and he hadn't. He got angry and manipulative, we argued all the time and somehow he always ended up putting me down.  I started feeling degraded, but I kept hoping things would get better once he got past his disappointment and for a while they did.  I thought that I loved him enough to make love with him, but I suppose I was also afraid I'd lose him. 

 

“We'd been planning our graduation trip to Mars for nearly a year and I thought that would have been the perfect time.  But we only ended up fighting—we went exploring in the underground caves and I found a fossil.  I reported it to the scientific council, but nothing came of it except that people knew that we'd gone into the caves although we knew that they were illegal. After that everything was just too much of a mess.  It had started out so bright and wonderful and hopeful, that I felt betrayed when it ended with him so angry and resentful of me."

 

Chakotay nodded understandingly.  He'd been in enough relationships to know what that felt like, both as the object of that anger and resentment and as the one having those feelings at the end of an acrimonious break-up.  He was sorry now that her first relationship had ended so badly.  "What about at the Academy?" he asked thoughtfully.

 

She laughed.  "I was still smarting about Cheb for a few months afterwards and pretty gun-shy. I was also still trying to sort myself out there, trying to do well in my school work and keep off the probation lists."  Chakotay chuckled at the reference as she continued.  "I just didn't have the time in first year—or make the time. The few invitations I did accept never really amounted to anything and because I didn't make the time, there were usually no second dates.  Then in my second year, I started my project with Admiral Paris and just sort of got caught up in it.  I did go out a few times on blind dates my roommate and my other friends set up, but only one date really stood out for me.  It was only because the cadet—one William T. Riker—reminded me so much of Cheb that I bolted on him and went back to the dorm to work on my thesis proposal on massive compact halo objects." 

 

Chakotay fixed her with a shocked stare of recognition and began to laugh—great, big whoppers that made his sides ache. 

 

She looked at him in annoyance and demanded, "What is so funny?"

 

"You couldn't be," he giggled hysterically.  "Oh, by the sweet gods you were! You were the redhead! You were the one. Did you know that you were infamous?  Do you know what they nicknamed you?"  She looked at him in confusion.  "My gods Kathryn, I can't believe it—you were the Iron Maiden?  The woman who put an end to Riker's scoring streak with an almost complete shut out."

 

She smiled dryly.  "The nickname I know about—it was one of the things Phoebe took pains to acquaint me with ten years ago, but I don't know anything about Will Riker's streak. All I remember about that night was that he was just too smooth and assured for me and reminded me too much of Cheb."

 

Chakotay made an effort to control himself, but still continued to chuckle softly. "You're right, he always was a self-assured, arrogant devil—but that was his reputation. The thing that made him a legend among the other pilots was that any woman that went out with him on a first date, invariably went out with him on a second and he'd had an unbroken streak since first year until you very publicly put an end to that. He was supposed to be irresistible, but he hadn't even finished his first date with you.  You just unceremoniously dumped him in the middle of a crowded bistro.  He didn't even have a chance at a second date and then it got out that you hadn't even known that you were having a date with him, that it had been a blind date. The others decided to call it a shut out since twenty minutes didn't constitute a date and for the first time in two years Riker was shot down in a blaze of glory.  I don't know who started it, but someone said that a woman would have to be made out of iron—she would have to be an Iron Maiden—to resist Riker and I guess the name sort of stuck."

 

"I guess it did if you remembered that stupid nickname and not my real name," she said in annoyance.

 

He laughed again.  "I don't even think I was ever told your name.  I vaguely remember someone pointing you out to me across the quad and telling me that you were the redhead, the one who finally shot down Riker and gave the rest of us a chance with the women on campus.  I don't even think I saw you more than two or three times around—we didn't exactly run with the same set of people and mostly it was a story that was legendary.  If Riker had no luck at all with you, what made us poor, mere mortals think that we would.  Ironically, I think most people thought the part about working on the thesis was a myth, an excuse to get out of the date, but I guess everyone I knew just sort of deemed you an Untouchable and went to seek greener pastures.  But how was it you didn't know about the nickname—we always assumed you did, but didn't care."

 

"I don't know," she mused with a wry twist of her lips. "I suppose most of that was my own obliviousness.  I was not much of a partier, school was always too important.  Then I guess my friends were too kind to say anything to hurt me and others simply did what you did, assumed that I knew but didn't care. Come to think of it, I do remember getting some strange looks the few times Mark came by to visit me for a day, but I just put that down to his looks—you know, long hair, tall and gangly, rather unkempt civilian attire.  Anyway, after Phoebe's pal complained to her about me, she told me that I really should learn to loosen up, or risk becoming the Iron Maiden everyone at the Academy had thought I was.  She said that most people were already starting to compare me to the notorious, frigid, humourless hardasses like Necheyev and Grayson. Women people respected for their minds, but hardly anyone knew or liked.  God, even my mother had known about the Iron Maiden nickname," she said shaking her head sadly. 

 

"I asked her for some advice after Phoebe and I talked and she told me that while it was important to let people know I had the mind for the job, it was also important to be able to make friends, to be warm and approachable. She also realised that it would be a hard thing to balance in a command situation, but warned me that a good commander was someone that the crew knew was there for them, someone who wouldn't ream them unfairly or be unreasonable.  I also needed to be someone who did everything she could to make damned sure that no one walked all over her or took advantage of her or anyone else."

 

"Sounds like wise advice," Chakotay murmured softly.

 

"It was," Kathryn replied.  "She also told me that although my sex life—or lack there-off—had worried her, it was important that I follow my instincts and do what felt right to me.  It really was no one else's business but my own and if celibacy made me happy, then so be it. She basically told me to ignore Phoebe, but not to forget my interpersonal skills or dismiss the importance of making friends.  But even with all that, I think that it was a huge relief to her when Mark and I fell in love.  Phoebe's only comment was that it was about time I noticed him, considering that he'd been waiting for me to practically since the day I was born," she finished with a laugh.

 

"What?" Chakotay asked in shock.

 

Kathryn giggled and shook her head.  "Our mothers even had the pictures to prove it," she said.  "Pictures of Mark holding me when I was an infant—he was four and I was less than a year old.  His mother said he'd been enchanted by me even then.  I couldn't believe it, but when I thought about it later, I realised that for most of my life he'd been one of my closest friends even when I hadn't been nearly a good enough one to him. I'd been trusting him and confiding in him almost my entire life without even realising he was there. I guess you can say that when it comes to love I can be pretty blind," she finished softly and kissed him.

 

"I guess so," he answered in amazement.

 

****

 

 

Chakotay watched her face in the pale moonlight as she slept beside him. He thought about their conversation again and shook his head in disbelief at the entire extraordinary exchange. It explained a whole lot of things about her—the least of which was her sexual innocence. He understood now why she'd always been so concerned about the crew, why most of the Marquis had liked her, although there had been enough of those who hadn't.  Her mother’s advice also explained how she became comfortable enough to allow Paris' wise cracks on the bridge, tolerated his more benign gambling endeavours.  She'd realised the need to keep the crew relaxed when they were not in a crisis situation and her maddening habit of flirting with him had been more of the same. 

 

However, while she may have found it safe and relaxing to flirt with him, he most definitely had not—it had been more along the lines of slow torture. He also wondered how even after being in a relationship with Mark for five years, she still remained so strangely unspoiled, untutored in her reactions.  Not that he was complaining, but by her accounts, Mark had been an experienced man of the world.  Chakotay reasoned at last, that if he had been the sort of man Kathryn had trusted for so long, then like he, Chakotay, Mark would have found her a refreshing change.  He would not have wanted those honest, natural, soulful reactions to be schooled out of her, or for her to become as jaded and blasé about sex as a lot of women Chakotay had known.

 

He smiled as he realised that she still approached sex with a sense of wonder, still felt that making love was something that should be done with someone she had committed herself to, someone she loved. 

 

She loved him, he thought with a happy chuckle as he pulled her to him more closely. When she'd said she loved him, it hadn't been just meaningless words thrown out in the heat of the moment—she'd really meant them.  He wanted to give a loud yell and run shouting through the forest, Kathryn Janeway loved him.  He looked down at her face again and wondered if he'd ever been this happy before, then a moment later, he felt the first pang of true fear as he realised just how fragile this happiness was, how easily it could be destroyed.  And he understood the depth of her fright that night when she didn't know where he was or how to find him—if he was alive or dead. He kissed her softly and whispered an ancient prayer as she continued to sleep peacefully in his arms.

 

****

 

 

Kathryn smiled as he helped her plant the last plots of a small leafy cabbage-like star flower plant. It bore small, white star-shaped flowers on aerial stalks and later a sweet, delicate, yellow fruit.  The leaves were good for salads as well—as nutritious as Terran spinach.

 

Chakotay had finished the greenhouse in record time—two months. Now they were almost finished stocking it with a combination of Terran plant samples from Voyager, some alien samples Neelix had provided from half the sector and some of the native plant staples they'd determined would be best adapted to grow in the greenhouse environment.

 

Her hands stopped their task as she stared lovingly, through the glass wall, at the house awash in silver moonlight.  Manufacturing the glass panes had been a major undertaking, opting for old-fashioned silica based glass, but easily strengthened with mesoquartzite and a poly-aluminum alloy.  She was sure it would be able to stand up to anything those plasma storms could throw at it.  They'd used the shuttle engines to heat the moulds, but in all, the amount of power used was the equivalent of a good jaunt to orbit and back.  Chakotay had also built the water reservoir, which serviced the house and her tub as well, into the back of the greenhouse so that it would be easier to cloak when the time came.  It and it's atmospheric collector and recycler units took up almost the entire back wall together with the small generator and humidity regulator, but even that cool shadowed area had been put to good use growing edible fungi and other plants that thrived in the moist, dank shade.

 

As for her, she was almost at a standstill with the cloaking device, but not on any of the things she had expected to give her problems.  In fact she could replicate almost all the components for the circuitry and the power-systems in less than a week. It would be little bit of a strain on the replicator, but they hadn't needed to use it except for the painkiller and medical supplies when Chakotay had burned his hands on one of the glass moulds over a month before. 

 

No, what had stopped her dead in her tracks was what to use for the outer casing of the device and it's accessory components.  There was no way the house replicator and the shuttle's small replicator together could manufacture even a tenth of the amount of duratanium they needed without both power systems being completely drained.  The small trace amounts needed for the circuitry components would not be a problem, but that shell needed to be at least three centimetres thick, while the standard was five centimetres.  She had thought that she could come up with a viable alternative, but so far she'd been frustrated at every turn.

 

To make matters worse, they had detected a ship at extreme sensor range passing through the system eight days before.  It hadn't seemed particularly interested in the planet and in fact seemed to pay little attention to the system as a whole.  But Kathryn and Chakotay had spent a tense hour and a half waiting with all power systems off, except for the shuttle's passive sensors, while the ship passed out of range.  They hadn't been able to tell what type of ship it was, but Chakotay speculated that it had probably been a merchant or a transport ship by the way it had lumbered slowly through the system.

 

They had made passionate love that night, desperate to keep the darkness and all that lurked there at bay, to reaffirm each other and the love they would always share no matter what the future held. 

 

She smiled now as he wrapped his arms around her from behind, and remembered another night of passion only a few days before that, a small celebration of sorts at the completion of the greenhouse.  He had playfully put his hand over her eyes, and had guided her out that night, to a wondrous castle of light beneath a velvet canopy of stars. He’d taken her inside the greenhouse and they had feasted on their favourite dishes made entirely from native foods.  Then they had danced their favourite waltzes mingled with the harmonies of the insects and other nocturnal animals.

 

Finally, as the sprinkler systems came on for the first time, drenching them with a fine mist, he had leaned her against the same glass wall she was now looking out of, removed their clothing, and together, they had performed a rite of blessing. They had made it a place of power and fertility, he said, a good place provided with nourishment from their souls that would in turn provide them with nourishment for their bodies.  She laughed softly now as she sank deeper into his embrace; she was beginning to like his traditions more and more each day.

 

Kathryn felt like a newly-wed, even though they hadn't said any formal vows, made any promises other than their declarations of love, but every day affirmed that love and she didn't really feel that they had to.  It had been over two glorious months since that first night, and although they were now a little more restrained about when and where they made love, there was nothing restrained about their lovemaking. His spontaneity and imagination knew no bounds.  The games he introduced her to took her breath away and there were times when she found herself waiting in anticipation, breasts heaving, and all her muscles taut—waiting for his touch which would make her body sing an ancient song to the heavens. She laughed again; they’d blessed a dozen places along the river and half the trees in the forest.  They ought to be very fruitful in the spring.

 

He kissed her gently with twinkling eyes.  "Well, it looks like we're all done Kathryn, there's only the neo-potato stand left to move inside, and we can do that in the morning."

 

"Umm, and not a moment too soon," she answered tiredly as they washed their hands and returned to the house.  "It's really starting to get chilly at night and the trees have turned rather quickly.  I'm going to miss not being able to relax in the tub when it gets too cold," she said, accepting a cup of rich, hot tea he'd left steeping on the stove.

 

"I could build a shelter for it," he laughed.  "We could start tomorrow after we stow the boat in the cave.  The ground isn't frozen yet and I don't expect the first frost for another two or three weeks. It'd be a cold run to and fro’, but you could still have your baths."

 

She joined his laughter shaking her head, "I don't think so—that's a bit too much work just for a bath.  I'll just have to make do with the sonic shower," she continued wistfully as she sat down at her console.  "Besides, part of the charm was being able to bathe under the stars. No, I'll just have to bear it until spring.  Anyway, I'd say we did a good job of getting ready for winter.  We've got a great deal stored in the pantry and freezers, fresh fruits and vegetables and we're still getting fresh fish from the river, but it seems a little strange and quiet with the monkeys and most of the other animals gone farther south or getting ready for hibernation.  I just wish I knew what to do about this cloaking device."

 

He leaned over her shoulders and kissed her cheek.  "You'll figure something out," he encouraged. "I have great confidence in your powers of improvisation."

 

She shook her head in frustration, "Chakotay, this isn't something that lends itself easily to improvisation! It's not like taking a piece of wood and bonding it so that it's stronger.  If the material in the casing isn't just right, we'll blow ourselves, and half this continent to kingdom come!" 

 

In all the time she had been working on the mechanics of the device itself, she had also been trying to come up with a solution to the casing problem, but to no avail.  Now she was just plain frustrated.  As if in tune with her state of mind, her teacup slipped from her tired grasp and crashed to the floor. 

 

"Oh damn!" she exclaimed angrily.  It was part of the set of earthenware dishes he'd made a few weeks ago around the time he'd made the glass, and she'd come to cherish each piece as she cherished everything he'd made for her.

 

"Hey, don't worry so much," he said soothingly as he stooped to pick it up. "See," he said holding up the cup, painted with a bright, geometric Meso-american design. "Not even chipped—I made them strong enough to resist even the formidable Captain Janeway," he quipped and she laughed in relief as she took it from him.  On a whim, she scanned it with her tricorder.

 

"Kathryn, why are you scanning that cup?" he asked in bemused exasperation.

 

She grinned impishly. "Just making sure it's all right—it's my favourite."

 

He looked dubiously at her. "They're all the same, Kathryn," he observed.

 

"Ah-ah. This one's special—see how the pattern sort of goes off-track here?" she replied, pointing out the flaw in the design.  The eagle's wing looked a bit out of joint and he was touched.  He hadn't expected her to be so observant about such a small thing.

 

"You're a nut," he whispered as she gazed lovingly at him.

 

After a moment in silence, he took the cup from her and placed it firmly on the desk.  "Come on, why don't we turn in early, and you can start fresh tomorrow after we put the boat away. I don't have anything else planned other than moving the potatoes and roasting some blacknuts to make bread. Things have been hectic. You can even take the day off and relax, clear your head and come at it from a new perspective.  Give your brain a rest and a chance to recharge its creative engines before taxing them again."

 

She stood and took his hand.  "All right, you win."  She looked at him speculatively and asked in her most playful voice, "Since I'm being good, will you give me a massage?"

 

"Yes," he answered laughing.  "And if you're very good, I might even give you something more," he said pulling her up against him.

 

Kathryn could feel his passion beginning to stir, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, rubbing herself provocatively against him.  "Oh I'm good," she purred seductively. "I'm very, very good."

 

****

 

 

"Chakotay ..." A gentle voice nudged itself into his consciousness.

 

"Go back to sleep Kathryn," he muttered still clinging to the vestiges of his dream. "I’m tired ... make love in the morning."

 

He heard her distant chuckle as the dream reformed around him and she shook him a little more roughly.  "Chakotay, wake up!  Come on, get up."

 

He responded to the urgency in her voice and sat up quickly. "What's wrong Kathryn? Has there been another warning from the shuttle?"

 

"No, no, nothing like that," she replied impatiently and he frowned in confusion as she held out two teacups to him.  "What are these made of, Chakotay? How exactly did you make them?"

 

He felt a spurt of anger and extreme annoyance well up inside him and before he could stop himself, he yelled, "For the love of god Kathryn! You woke me out of a sound sleep at two in the morning to ask about goddamned crockery?  Of all the insane, irrational things—now turn off the lights and come back to bed!" he demanded officiously.

 

She blinked at him in surprise, and burst into a fit of giggles as she brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes.  "I'm sorry, Chakotay," she apologised contritely as she looked at the chronometer.  "I didn't think to look at the time, but if you'd stop your revving your testosterone engines for a moment and answer me, I'll explain what I'm doing up."

 

He muttered to himself as he heaved out of bed, "Not another word you—not until I wash my face and figure out my head from my ass."

 

Her laughter followed him into the bathroom.  "Grouchy—are we?" she called with that infuriating note of mocking in her voice.  "I'll get you some tea."

 

Chakotay found her at the desk busily running tricorder scans on her teacup. She handed him his tea absently, as he sat in front of the computer monitor full of formulas. "Ok Kathryn, what's this all about?" he asked as the aroma of the tea began to clear the cobwebs from his mind.

 

She grinned at him as she answered, "That is the formula for a ceramic based, aluminum-duratanium poly-alloy the Romulans used as a casing for one of their early, successful cloaking devices nearly two centuries ago.  It's so bloody archaic, I just sort of glossed over the whole damned thing because the basic technology of the cloak itself stayed the same, but the major thing is that the ceramaic poly-alloy worked and it worked well.  It was only when the Helstrom process, perfected within ten years of that device coming into use, and later, when replicator technology made manufacturing duratanium economically feasible for widespread use, that they stopped using it. Using duratanium at one quarter the thickness of the old casing still gave them the same amount of strength. Now compare their ceramic base to yours," she said excitedly. Two molecular representations appeared on the screen.  His breath caught as she laughed gleefully.  "Now do you see why I had to wake you?"

 

He laughed with her as he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her between his legs.  "You're amazing," he said softly as she kissed him.  "See, I told you it would come to you if you just stopped thinking about it."  He turned to study the monitor again, with her sitting on his lap. "It's similar, but not all that close though.  Do you think that it'll be easy to transform it into the Romulan ceramic?"

 

"Nope," she giggled and he looked at her in confusion.  "It's already better than what they were using, and in terms of what I have in mind, I suspect that it's going to be a lot easier to work with—but that all depends on exactly how you managed to make it this strong.  I compared it to the readings we got from the clay in this region, but none of it matches Chakotay," she said in confusion.  "Where did it come from?"

 

Chakotay grinned delightedly as he answered her, "Stumped you huh—well the clay is just the normal stuff that's down by the river." He kissed her and laughed heartily as she opened her mouth to interrupt him.  "But I suspect what did the trick was the couple of handfuls of the silica-mesoquarzite mixture we used for the glass that I added to the clay."

 

She looked at him in stunned astonishment for a few moments before she croaked, "You added a couple of handfuls?"  She looked at the computer screen again with new understanding.  "Oh Lord—I'm a prized idiot.  Why didn't I see it before?  Exactly how much did you add?"

 

He laughed and pulled her closer.  "I don't know really—I was just fooling around and I wanted to make the crockery a little more resistant to breakage during the plasma storms. I added maybe one hundred—one hundred and fifty grams for every five hundred grams of clay, mulched it all together till it was fairly uniform.  Then I made the pieces, fired them, cooled them, painted and glazed them with a little of the glaze bond we made to coat the wood for the greenhouse frame, then fired them again in the oven we made for the glass moulds.  I even have a little left over in the storage room." 

 

She would have bolted from his lap but he held her firmly.  "Oh no you don't," he admonished. "It can wait until morning." She pouted, then laughed and laid her forehead against his, planting a playful kiss on his nose.  "Why don't you tell me what you have planned and then we head back to bed—surely you can't use it just like that."

 

"No," she answered bringing up another set of formulas on the computer screen. "We won't even be able to produce enough duratanium for the poly-alloy, but we do have an abundance of the next best thing—titanium.  A titanium-aluminum poly-alloy mixed with a little neosteel together with your ceramic would be almost as strong.  And since the grade of trialurite is like nothing the Romulans ever had, I don't think we'll have much of a problem getting away with using a fifteen centimetre thick casing on the device itself and ten to twelve centimetres on the emitters.  However," she laughed as she shut off the console and rose out of his lap, leading the way to the bedroom.  "We are going to have to characterise and standardise your formula beyond a couple of handfuls. I’ll need play with the proportions of the silica-mesoquartzite mixture, get rid of a lot of impurities and figure out just how much of a role that bond-glaze played Chakotay, because I didn't even detect its presence."

 

He nodded tiredly as he climbed into bed and pulled her to him.  "All right," he said, smiling at her excited face.  "We'll get to it first thing tomorrow—the bread making can wait a few days I suppose, but I want to get the neo-potatoes into the greenhouse as soon as possible in case I'm wrong about my predictions for frost.  Now pipe down and go to sleep."

 

"Yes sir!" she rapped out and saluted him comically, before kissing him good night.

 

#

 

Part 4: The Echo of Dreams

 

 

Kathryn dropped the padd in frustration onto the bed and stared out the window as the snow continued to fall.  There was no way to make simple log entries about this—there were no words to express their pain and she didn't know if he would ever come home again. After his initial deluge of anger, he'd returned ten hours later, packed his camping gear, clothing, food supplies, medicine bundle and taken his communicator without a word to her—without even attempting to listen to her.  Since then they hadn't exchanged a word in two weeks. 

 

Oh, she knew exactly where he was—in the cave where they'd stored the boat, but a diagnostic of the communicator showed that he'd disabled the receiver function.  All that was left was the locator and the biomonitor to tell her he was still alive and she was grateful for that at least.  He didn't want to even hear her voice and all her explanations had been lost in the dead, frozen air between them before she realised he couldn't hear her. She had gone to the cave in the raging, blinding storm four days before and found it's entry way blocked by the heavy wooden door on which she had pounded uselessly—trying to explain how everything had changed and how much she needed his help. 

 

She began to cry softly again, her tears falling like the snow—she had needed his help, his love and support—but in the end, she had truly been alone.

 

****

 

 

Chakotay held her as she continued her dry heaves over the toilet. "Gods Kathryn," he croaked anxiously as he fumbled with the tricorder.  "What's wrong?  You were fine a few days ago." 

 

In fact they'd both been in perfect health since being stranded nine months earlier, and except for a few minor mishaps, neither had needed much medical attention—until now.  Her head pounded furiously, her eyes felt swollen and heavy and her stomach gave another painful lurch as she sat on the toilet cover.

 

"Leave me the tricorder and go make me some tea Chakotay," she told him, trying to catch her breath.  "I'll be fine when this wave of nausea passes—I can handle the scan by myself."

 

Kathryn's hand shook as she took the tricorder from him and she fought to steady it. He left reluctantly. She looked bleakly at her reflection in the mirror and began the scan.  As it beeped, she didn't even need to look at the results; looking only confirmed what she knew—she was pregnant. She didn't realise that she'd made any noise, but she must have, because he was back, tenderly lifting her up and taking her into the living room.

 

"What is it Kathryn?" he asked in concern as he settled her into one of the chairs.

 

She began to cry as her mind raced trying to find answers.  "I'm pregnant, Chakotay," she said fearfully showing him the results of the scan.  "It's a girl," she continued, sobbing as she reached for him.

 

He looked at her flabbergasted for a moment and then a wide grin transformed his face as he looked down at her mid-section.  "You're pregnant?" he gasped in disbelief. "Oh gods!" he shouted as it fully registered and he scooped her up into his arms again and spun her around, leaving her dizzy and breathless.  "You wonderful, beautiful, miraculous woman," he shouted, kneeling in front of her as she sat down again and tenderly running his hand over her abdomen.  "A girl, a beautiful daughter—oh Kathryn, this is wonderful.  How far along are you?" he asked, breathless with excitement.

 

"A little over a month," she whispered through her tears. "How did this happen Chakotay?" she asked fearfully as his happiness washed over her. "We've both been careful to monitor our fertility suppresser implants—they were working fine. This shouldn't have happened. How could this possibly have happened?" she asked, her voice rising in despair.

 

He looked up at her in confusion, and gently brushed the long locks of hair out of her face.  "Does it matter Kathryn?" he asked softly.  "A joyful accident, a glorious miracle—all that matters is that it happened, and we're going to have a baby, a beautiful little girl."

 

"But it's not all that matters," she cried, heartbroken. "We decided that we wouldn't have any children.  All the reasons for that decision haven't changed Chakotay—we can't have a baby, not here, not now."

 

She could see the alarm in his eyes as he attempted to put his arms around her. "You're overwhelmed Kathryn, you should get back to bed and I'll bring you that tea," he said softly. "Everything's changed now, you weren't pregnant when we made those decisions—we'll just have to adapt to it."

 

He rose quickly and hurried into the kitchen, but she didn't move from her chair. She probed her abdomen tentatively as the tears ran down her cheeks, and looked up as he returned with the cup of tea, carefully skirting around the components for the cloaking device she'd left strewn on the floor. 

 

"But they haven't changed Chakotay," she said as he stood frozen holding the cup out to her. "Look at us Chakotay, how can we bring a child into this world under these conditions. Look at the tricorder readings—she's already infected with the virus.  A virus we can't cure, one that will condemn her to live on this planet for the rest of her life."  The hard look that came into his eyes frightened Kathryn, but she pressed on, trying to get him to remember all those reasons they had discussed.  "What happens when we die, Chakotay—what happens to her, God forbid, if we die before she is able to take care of herself?" she asked, horrified at the thought.

 

She could see him making a visible effort to control himself.  "Come, Kathryn," he said, his voice coming out harsh and ragged.  "Let's get you to bed.  We can't make any decisions right now—we both need time to think this over. Please go and lie down, Kathryn. We'll discuss it later!"

 

She sat in the chair looking up at him and trembled at the building rage that infused his voice with every word.  Slowly she stood and began to make her way to the bedroom.  She heard the cup slam into the wall and clatter uselessly away, unbroken. 

 

"God damn you, Kathryn!" he shouted, turning her roughly around to face him.  "What are you suggesting?  What the hell are you suggesting, Kathryn?  That we kill her, pretend that she never existed?  Is that what you want to do?"

 

She was screaming now—in despair and anguish for him, herself and their child. "No that is not what I want!" she cried desperately.  "But we have to think of what this means, Chakotay.  What do we have to give this baby?  What chance at a life will she have here? Are we ready to condemn her selfishly to a life of utter loneliness for what may well be her entire life with no chance at a life of her own—no chance of love?"

 

He released her so unexpectedly that she stumbled against wall. "We'll make those chances Kathryn!" he replied.  There was a menacing rumble in his voice she'd never associated with him. "We'll work harder to find a cure and we won't give up!  We'll find a way to leave here Kathryn, we'll find a way for her—and even if we can't catch up with Voyager there are other places we could go.  We could take the shuttle back to Ocampa—or better yet to Evansville's colony back on that Briori planet.  You could see Earhart again."

 

She heard the desperate hope in his voice and wanted with equal desperation to believe him.  "But what if we can't leave here—what then?" she whispered, clinging to the wall for support. Tears ran down her cheeks.

 

"Then we'll make a life for her here," he replied reasonably, his voice almost normal again. "We'll make a good life for her here. She'll have us with her a long time—we'll teach her what she needs to know.  There's no reason for her to be lonely, maybe even in time there'll be more children—"

 

As he said it, Kathryn's fury ignited and exploded. 

 

"More children!" she screamed hysterically and the smile that had begun to form on his face shattered.  "Are you even listening to what you're saying?  Are you even thinking for God's sake Chakotay?  You want to bring even more ... more children into this _impossible_ situation, just so this one won't be lonely?  And just what kind of life are you setting up here for them as they grow up with no one but each other to turn to?" she asked hoarsely in horror.

 

"And you want to kill our greatest hope for the future Kathryn! You're not even listening to what I have to say!" he spat venomously.  "Don't I have a say in this?  It's my child too," he shouted and brought his face close to hers so that she had to flatten against the wall. 

 

She could see the implacable look in his eyes. 

 

"You want my permission—my help to kill our child?  Well you'll never get it.  You want to talk about selfishness? You're the one who's being selfish—selfish and afraid and you're willing to kill our baby because of it.  Well I won't have any part in it!  We created a life Kathryn, for better or for worse, we created this child together and I am not going to allow you to just throw it away because you're afraid!"

 

Kathryn wrapped her arms around herself as he flung out of the house, not even stopping to take a jacket.  The door stood open, but she didn't notice as she watched him quickly disappear from view.  She felt the coldness begin to spread through her limbs from within as she stumbled into the bedroom and fell across the bed.  She didn't cry as she crawled beneath the covers shivering violently, the tears had already frozen in her—she'd never been so cold in all her life.

 

****

 

 

"Chakotay, please—I have to talk to you, there's something I have to explain," she pleaded with him, trying to block his exit from the greenhouse.

 

It had been a month since he'd last spoken to her and she looked pale and tired. He had shut the receiver component of the communicator off after his second night in the cave when he couldn't listen to any more of her pleading and her excuses.  She also couldn't beam in because of the minerals in the rocks; it was one of the reasons they'd chosen that particular cave as a storage area for things they couldn't easily cloak.

 

He gave a frustrated groan as he tried to move past her and steeled himself to those gorgeous, tearful, blue eyes in her white face. 

 

"Unless you're going to tell me that you over-reacted, that you're going to have our baby, Kathryn—that you'll give her a chance—we have nothing to talk about. I don't want to hear your _explanations_ ," he finished sarcastically.

 

He saw her pale even more, but she lifted her chin defiantly. "Then you're saying you don't want me without the child," she whispered.

 

His heart lurched painfully, but he stood his ground, holding her gaze. "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying," he replied, angry that she should force him to make this choice.

 

"I see," she continued in a level voice, standing aside to let him pass. "Goodbye, Chakotay, I won't bother you anymore.  If you ever decide you want to come back to the house—that you can live under the same roof as me, your room will always be there."  Without another word, she turned and went inside, shutting the door firmly behind her.

 

So the great Captain Kathryn Janeway had made her decision, he thought bitterly—she didn't want him and she didn't want his child.  He shouldered the sack of vegetables and closed the greenhouse door behind him, wondering what she would do now.

 

The sharp claw of conscience gripped him as he began to walk away. What if something went wrong when she tried to do it alone?  The safest time for an abortion was as early in the pregnancy as possible, preferably before 20 weeks.  She was almost nine weeks along now, nearly half way there and the longer she waited, the more dangerous it would be—the fewer options she would have as to the number of procedures that could be safely performed.  Then there would be none.

 

He thought again of her closed off face, the Captain's face, shutting him out of the decision as always and he continued to walk away.  He was tired of being the one who had to work for this relationship—to get at her reasons and allaying her fears as he had done when she'd been running scared at the beginning.  Well she was running scared again, refusing to listen to his reasons, to what he wanted.  He knew what she wanted; she wanted him to tell her it was all right to do this, that he would still love her if she did, but he had no say in what would happen to their child.  Well it was her decision—her choice—and she'd made it abundantly clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

 

As he tramped through the snow, he thought again of those precious few moments of incomparable happiness when she had announced that she was pregnant. Moments that should have lasted a lifetime, not mere minutes—seconds even—when he realised that she did not share his sense of celebration, that all she could see were problems. Well, he would fight her with the only weapons he had against her; his help, his love, and time. He didn't know how much longer she would wait; he only knew that the longer she did, the harder it would be for her to do it alone.

 

****

 

 

Kathryn looked up tiredly from her microscope—the cell cultures were doing well. Hopefully in a few weeks this batch as well as those she'd taken from the monkeys and any other mammals she could find, would give her some clue as to a cure for the virus. She looked at the cloaking device, assembled and stored in the corner.  She gave a bitter, unused-sounding laugh, the only thing not installed was the trialurite energy core—not that they really needed it any longer. Neither one of them cared who came along and blasted them from the sky.  She'd even worked out most of the modifications they would need for a phased cloak—even found a surprising interaction between the mesoquartzite and the phasing mechanism, but even that failed to keep her attention for more than a few days.

 

She sighed as she put her cultures back into their slots in the incubator. She didn't even know why she kept hunting for a cure, except it gave her something to do during these endless winter days. 

 

Six months of winter—the planet took over fifteen standard months to complete one local year.  They had been on this world a little over thirteen standard Terran months, more than a year, but it would take at least another two months to return to the early springtime conditions when they were first stranded. 

 

She hadn't even remembered the anniversary of _Voyager's_ departure until two days after it had passed and when she finally thought of it, she found that she really didn’t care much one way or the other. There was no one to celebrate it with.

 

She took a sip of coffee—her one indulgence from the replicator. Her diet was almost exclusively vegetarian by necessity; although now and then she would defrost a piece of fish or poultry and char it almost to a crisp before forcing it down in order to get enough protein.

 

The only way she knew that he'd been around was from seeing his tracks in the snow around the greenhouse, or noticing when something had been taken from the pantry—a sack of blacknuts, some grain or some other supply. He usually waited for her to take her daily walk, in order to avoid meeting her.

 

But she’d seen him again earlier that day, when one of the rare winter plasma storms had forced her to cut her walk short.  Her heart almost broke when his gaze automatically went for her abdomen as she unwrapped her heavy coat, before meeting her eyes in a terrible rictus of pain and sorrow and disappointment and heartbreak and disgust. He had hurried out of the house without a word and taken shelter in the greenhouse while he waited for the storm to pass. 

 

If she had been pregnant, she would have been in her fifth month, too late to safely perform an abortion.  What he didn't know was that the day of their last conversation in the greenhouse, it had already been a moot point for more than a week.  He had not been willing to listen to her, to give her a chance to explain what had happened—she was nothing to him without his child. 

 

Now all she could do was keep at this fruitless search for a cure—she didn't even know what good it would do if one were to be found.  All she knew was he wouldn't see her through some of the darkest days of her life.  He'd left her in the cold, frozen, white world, pounding desperately—futilely—on his door, condemning her to endure the darkness alone.  There was a cold and empty place inside her now and it would never be filled again.

 

****

 

 

So that was it—poof!  And a child was gone as if it had never existed, all on her say so.  Her guilty eyes had followed his to her flat abdomen, which had borne life only a few short months before.  She hadn't made an effort to speak this time, to offer another of her "explanations".  She had just stood there and waited for him to leave and he'd done so gladly, eager to get as far away from her as he could at that moment.

 

He closed his eyes now, placed his hand on the ahkoonah and began to chant a prayer for his daughter's soul; he, at least, would mourn the passing of that short life from this one.

 

"Why are you here Chakotay?"  His eyes flew open and found himself in his dark cave again. He looked around for his father, but realised that he was not in the dream plane.  He looked down at the crackling fire ring. Although he had a portable generator to keep warm, he preferred the fire.  He'd moved his bed and most of his things from his bedroom early on, everything except his computer.  Whenever he needed to something to read, or he needed to record his thoughts, he used a padd and made regular uploads from the computer when he re-supplied.

 

Chakotay supposed he'd known all along that she'd terminated the pregnancy—gods what a turn of phrase. He had known, although seeing her at a distance for so many months all bundled up in her winter gear as she went for her daily walks, he'd fallen into a comfortable fantasy of hoping desperately she'd seen reason and had not gone through with it.  But after four months, his worst nightmare had been confirmed and he'd hoped he could finally be at peace enough to contact his spirit guide or his father.

 

However, each time he'd tried, he'd been unable to move beyond this consciousness. He had his way had been blocked by enigmatic questions in his father's voice or he found himself unable to concentrate. 

 

He gave up in exhaustion and sadly folded his medicine bundle. He would try again later, when he wasn't so angry.  In a way, a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders; he knew now exactly what she was capable of.

 

****

 

 

Chakotay,

            Thanks for the fish.  Here is a new formulation of supplements I hope will see us through the next few months. Take one each day with a glass of orange juice during a meal for the best results.  Kathryn.

 

He looked at the simple note on the desk again, then finally swallowed one small capsule with a glass of juice and pocketed the vial.  He stared out the window as he dropped the replicated bottle of juice into his carrying case—spring had returned and with it the birds and small animals.  The nights were still chilly, but it was good to be in the sun's warmth again.

 

A few days before, in a spate of good will after the first good catch of the season, he'd left a plate of leftover fried fish for her on the table. All she'd had to do was warm it up.  This was her thanks.  Well it was a start considering they hadn't spoken ten words to each other in close to six months. He gave a wry laugh as he gathered up his things and bit into one of the star flower fruits as he left. It was hard to believe that there had ever been a time when he could barely wait to hear the sound of her voice after being separated from her for more than a few hours.  But here they were, reduced to writing short, curt notes to each other about fish and dietary supplements.

 

The mud squelched under his boots as he trudged along the riverbank back to the cave.  Along with spring, his ability to contact his spirit guide had returned, but rather than gaining any sort of peace, he had only been left with a sense of frustration and a number of puzzling questions from both his guide and his father.

 

_"Why are you here Chakotay?"  The smoke thinned and he'd met the feral amber eyes of his spirit sister._

_"I have come to mourn the passing of my child."_

_"What child?"_

_"The one I will never have a chance to know," he'd answered sadly. "The one taken from me before I ever got a chance to know her.  I didn't have a choice in her life or in her death."_

_"We know of no such child, Chakotay," his Dream Father had answered, picking up the wooden flute, with two pieces of broken wood sticking out of the back of it and long, frayed lengths of string, as he stood beside the she-wolf and turned away.  "Do what you have come to do, Chakotay, if you feel you must. We have elsewhere to be."_

 

They had faded away, leaving him to perform his solitary ritual and each time he had contacted them after that, they had spoken only for a short while before leaving him with more questions—while answering none.

 

He thought again about Kathryn as he unpacked his weekly supplies and changed out of his sweaty clothing.  He wondered where she went on her daily walks and what she had done all winter. He knew she'd completed the cloaking device, but she'd done that fairly early. 

 

Part of the reason he'd left the fish for her was because a few days before he'd exited the shuttle after running its monthly diagnostic and seen her in the front of the house as she started down towards the river.  She hadn't put on her jacket yet and he was shocked to see how thin she had looked.  She didn't see him, but as he studied her, he noticed that her pace had been slow and tired—carefully picking her way along the path as if unsure of where to put her feet. 

 

He realised now, that as the winter had progressed she had slowed down, but seeing her leave earlier in the day, she had seemed more energetic and lively. Perhaps it had only been the late winter blues.  He laughed at himself; here was a woman who'd made it abundantly clear that she didn't want him in her life and here he was worrying because she looked a little thin.  He left the cave again and headed out towards the spot where patches of berries had sprung up in the last few weeks after the final thaw.  If it got a little warmer and drier in a few days, he'd try to move the boat by himself.

 

****

 

 

The shrill, incessant whine over Kathryn's commbadge puzzled her at first, until she realised that it was the alarm from Chakotay's communicator, indicating that he was hurt or ill.  She slapped it reflexively, calling, "Janeway to Chakotay," before she remembered that he'd taken the receiver function off-line months before.

 

She ran into the house and grabbed the medkit, turning on the computer and asking for his location and condition.  He was only about half a kilometre away upstream, close to the river—an area she knew well.  According to the biomonitor, he'd suffered a sprained ankle, twisted the ligaments in his knee, bruised his shoulder and was currently unconscious from what appeared to be a minor blow to the head.  She also knew that since he'd accepted her offering of the supplements two weeks before, he was also a little run-down. 

 

She quickly downloaded the information into her tricorder, made sure the link to the house computer was stable, then went into the shed for the travois they’d lovingly made the summer before for just such emergencies. As she hurried along, frequently consulting the instrument, she decided that she would have to take him back to the house where she would be better able to treat him under the guidance of the computer.  She supposed she could have used the shuttle's transporter to move him more quickly, but she needed to assess his injuries first hand and didn't want to depend on an automatic beam-out with no one at the controls unless she absolutely had to.

 

She found him easily, face down in the grass on the riverbank, the overturned boat beside him.  She felt a spurt of anger as she knelt beside him—the stubborn fool would rather move the damned thing in his obviously weakened condition, than call for her help. She consulted the tricorder; none of his injuries were severe and the concussion was mild.  She administered the recommended hypospray dosage of neuratheramine before she proceeded to roll him as gently as she could onto the travois.  Taking a moment to rest, she consulted the tricorder to make sure she hadn't exacerbated any of his other injuries, but there was nothing that couldn't be treated in a few minutes with the soft tissue regenerator.  As soon as she had him securely strapped in, she headed as quickly as she could towards the house, pulling him behind her with the minimum of bumps and general disturbances as she could manage.

 

Manoeuvring him onto the bed was the hardest part, but she had finally managed it, travois and all, before loosening the straps and rolling him off. She laughed softly as she pulled the sheet over him after removing his boots and clothing; she couldn't believe he'd slept through it all as she scanned him with the tricorder again. According to the analysis, he should be waking up within six hours.  Finally, she took the regenerator and repaired the minor damage he'd done to his limbs. 

 

As she consulted the tricorder again, she noted with satisfaction that he was in relatively good health—a little run down as she'd suspected, but otherwise almost normal. In a few days, he would for all intents and purposes be normal again.  She gave him wry look before gathering up the medical instruments and returning them to their cases.  Before leaving, she placed the tricorder on active scan and left it on the night table beside the bed. It would warn her if there were any complications, or when he began to awaken.

 

****

 

 

Chakotay awoke in familiar surroundings—or at least surroundings that had been familiar until almost six and a half months before, Kathryn's bedroom. As he tried to figure out what was going on with his head pounding like mad, she entered carrying a tray, which she placed on the night table, before picking up the tricorder and scanning him.

 

"Lie still for a minute while I finish this scan Chakotay," she ordered consulting the instrument.  "You've had a small accident."

 

"Accident?" he asked in confusion as she laid down the instrument and picked up the hypospray from the tray.  "What happened?"

 

He saw a glint of humour in her eyes as she bent to administer the hypospray. "That should take care of your headache," she began as the pounding instantly began to abate. "You tried to move the boat by yourself, but the boat had other ideas," she quipped as he blushed slightly.  "You sprained your ankle and damaged your shoulder and knee, they're repaired, but may be tender for the next day or so.  You've had a mild concussion and should stay in bed at least until noon tomorrow."  She settled the tray on his lap as he sat up.  "You're also a bit run down," she commented. "There's a supplement dissolved in the orange juice and I’ve brought you a bowl of chicken soup—replicated. You'll be fine in a few days. Don't hesitate to call if you need anything else," she said turning to the door.

 

He felt a rush of gratitude and called out to her, "Thank you, Kathryn."

 

She turned in the doorway and flashed him a brief smile.  "You're welcome, Chakotay," she replied before shutting the door.

 

He looked down at the tray, feeling a wave of regret as he drank half the glass of juice in one go.  It had taken an accident to get them to speak more words to each other than they had in months.  He felt a slight upset in his stomach he always felt after he'd taken one of her supplements, but it quickly settled as he began the soup.

 

****

 

 

Chakotay didn't know how much time had passed before awakened from his deep slumber, only that he was getting persistent and very strong signals from his bladder that it needed to be emptied immediately—if not sooner. He stumbled bleary-eyed to the bathroom, noting that Kathryn had curled up in the two easy chairs pushed together, sound asleep.  He left the bathroom, went to the linen closet and grabbed a sheet to cover her.

 

He was amazed at how tiny she looked, as well as how exhausted. He picked up the padd that had dropped from her hand and glanced at it before putting it down on the desk, "Recovery analysis of biomonitor assessment; Chakotay, day 16—dosage 70 mg per day".  He looked in shock from the padd to her sleeping face and then back again. He picked it up again and sat down heavily in the nearest chair.

 

Tricorder analysis of viral DNA eradication: 38% reduction in amount of viral DNA in cells over levels estimated from biomonitor analysis of day 15. Overall estimation of reduction in level of viral DNA in cells over day 0, 84.3%; reduction in levels of viral DNA in cells from last tricorder scan 210 days ago, 86.47%. Estimated time until complete eradication of viral DNA, 25 days, after which, supplements should be reformulated to a lower dosage of 5 mg per day to ensure adequate levels of tetradiagorine and alpha-oxyhyaluramine are maintained in his system.

 

Cellular analysis of abdominal cysts: confirmed biomonitor analysis, all cysts benign, none cancerous; no evidence of cancer in any bodily system. Reduction in number of cysts over estimated number from biomonitor analysis day 0, 60.2%; estimated mean reduction in size of cysts over day 0, 90.4%.  All cysts should be cleared up by the end of treatment regimen in 25 days and remain suppressed with lower dosage of formulation.

 

Notes: confirmed, citric acid in orange juice appears to enhance greatly the absorption of tetradiagorine into non-cancerous cysts by a factor of 5.47 over cancerous cysts; confirmed, suppression of oncogene function complete in pre-cancerous cysts; hypothesis, sustained low levels of formulation in system should prevent re-infection by viral pathogen.

 

He thumbed back through her days of analysis with trembling fingers and let the padd drop into his lap as he stared at her.  Her dietary supplements—no wonder he'd felt queasy taking them on an empty stomach and no wonder he'd felt run down and tired since he'd started taking them, but he'd put that down to the fact that he might have been coming down with something for a while now. 

 

In fact, he’d been feeling better, more invigorated over the last two days—because, he realised now, he was over the worst part of the treatment regimen. Why hadn't she told him, he wondered furiously.  Was she ever planning to tell him?  Oh, by the souls of his ancestors, the baby—if she had only waited, the baby would have been fine!  Rage caught in his throat as he looked down at her peaceful, sleeping face. 

 

She had thrown their child's life away for nothing!  No wonder she didn't tell him she'd found a cure—she'd been afraid as usual!

 

            _"What child?"_

_"We know of no such child Chakotay."_

 

The winds whispered to him and he couldn't drown out their voices.

 

_"Why are you here Chakotay?"_

_"We know of no such child Chakotay."_

_"Where is the harp Chakotay?"_

_"Why have you broken the harp, cut its strings so it no longer plays?"_

_"What harp Father?"_

_"The harp you've been taught how to play.  Why have your cut its strings?"_

_"We know of no such child Chakotay."_

_"What child?  What child ... what child ... what child ..."_

 

Amid the whispers, he looked down at the padd again and turned back to day 16. He hadn't had any cancerous cysts, yet somewhere there had been information on the absorption rate of the drug into cancerous cysts. 

 

She'd had cancerous cysts—cancerous abdominal cysts. 

 

His stomach lurched and he gave an involuntary cry as he rose unsteadily and stumbled to the bathroom.  Suddenly, he felt her holding his head and rubbing his back as he expelled all the hatred and anger he'd kept bottled up for the past six months.

 

"Are you all right Chakotay?" she asked in concern, handing him a glass of water, which he gulped and choked on.

 

He looked into her anxious eyes.  "Were you ever going to tell me?" he croaked in despair.

 

"Tell you?" she asked, clearly confused.

 

He pushed past her and scooped up the padd from the spot he'd dropped it. "Were you ever going to tell me about this?  Were you ever going to tell me you found a cure?" he asked angrily, shaking the padd in front her face.

 

"Yes," she whispered, turning pale.

 

"When? When were planning to tell me Kathryn?" he demanded in a low voice.  "Why did you think you had to trick me into the taking the treatment?"

 

Kathryn looked away from his face.  "I wasn't sure how well it would work—my regimen isn't completed yet, but you started to get more cysts and—" She broke off and met his eyes. "And I didn't think you'd take it from me after what happened."

 

"What did happen Kathryn?" he asked softly.  "What about the baby?"

 

"What about the baby?" she repeated moving past him towards the desk.

 

"Were you ever going to tell me about the cancer?"  He watched her back stiffen at his question before she began to tidy up the padds.

 

"What was there to tell?" she returned in a dull voice as she continued her task.

 

"What happened to the baby Kathryn?" he asked again, grabbing her arm and turning her to face him.  He'd thought she'd been crying, but she stared at him dry-eyed.

 

She folded her arms in front of her defensively and continued to stare at him. "Since you figured out about the cancer, you probably know the answer to that already," she replied stonily.  "There was no baby—at least not your baby—just my body playing a cosmic joke on me. We were fighting over nothing more than a mass of cells that were about to go cancerous.  It registered as a child because the virus acts as a sort of weird teratogenic oncogene, turning on the embryonic development program in the cells of the cyst when it implanted in my uterus. It even began to form organ systems like a real embryo." 

 

He listened in horror as she continued tonelessly. 

 

"We never bothered to check its genetic compliment that first night. Why would we think to? It was a child and the only way it could have got there was if it was yours—but it had started out as a simple clone of me.  Then a little more than two weeks later, the developmental program went haywire and it was nothing but a mass of cancer cells—a teratoma.  There wasn't anything left to do but get rid of it."

 

The whispers returned to cry in his ears, while phantom hands beat at his door in the storm.

 

_"Please let me explain, Chakotay..."_

_"I need your help..."_

_"There isn't any baby, please help me."_

 

He'd closed his ears and his mind until she'd gone away.  He'd tracked her back to the house through the storm, seen her safely inside, then closed himself away from her in his cave—and she'd had to do what she had to alone.

 

He tuned back into the toneless recitation. 

 

"Except it wasn't the only one, the cysts wouldn't stop forming in my uterus—they'd begin the developmental program then go cancerous.  I tried the standard chemotherapy, but it only slowed their growth a little.  So I began to study the cancerous cysts and I found that the ones I took out right after the plasma storms had slower growth rates than the ones a week later. I took the tissue samples from the monkeys and other animals out of stasis and allowed them to proliferate—they became cancerous over time.  I checked as many hibernating animals as I could find.  They were free of cancer, but once I got the samples back to the incubator and they came out of their dormant state, the cells became cancerous. The few birds, monkeys and small mammals I'd tagged had migrated further south. All moved into areas with high frequencies of plasma storms.

 

"By comparing the compounds in my frozen samples and those I drew fresh from the hibernating animals, I isolated a few compounds present in the frozen samples collected over the summer.  There was a progressively lower concentration of two compounds in the samples collected later in the fall as the frequency and severity of the plasma storms dropped.  One of the compounds was similar to the compound alpha-oxyhyalurine, which I found in the green fish last summer—except it was in a beta form and deoxygenated and the alpha-oxy derivative from the fish was extremely concentrated and potent. However, after the one of the plasma storms, I checked the air and water carefully for the beta-deoxy form and found trace amounts. 

 

"Adding the beta-deoxy form directly to the newly activated tissue from the hibernating animals caused it to be transformed into the alpha-oxy derivative specific to that species, which in turn caused a cascade of other biochemical reactions which kept the tissue from becoming cancerous.  Adding the beta-deoxy form to the primate tissue, not only caused it to produce the alpha-oxy form, and caused it to remain viable, but also produced a second compound, tetradiagorine.  When the second compound was added to the cancerous monkey cells together with the alpha-oxyhyalurine, they formed a dimer, which caused the cancer cells to stop proliferating and die.  However, the tetradiagorine only had limited success penetrating human cell membranes, but could be helped with the addition of citric acid, which bound to it.  It took a little molecular engineering to make derivatives of both compounds less toxic to our systems, but they still had to be rather potent in order to remain effective against the virus and had to be taken in rather high doses.

 

"The reason that the fish had such high concentration of the alpha-oxy form is because it sequesters the beta-deoxy form from the water as protection against the larva of the insect that plays host to the virus as well as other predators.  The larva leaves the water—I'm not sure when and burrows into the earth where it becomes a wingless adult. That's why I couldn't find it.  In the spring, the adults leave the ground, looking for a blood meal from whatever small mammal it can find.  It lays its eggs in or near the water, then either burrows back into the soil, or dies probably depending on it's age—my guess is that the adults live a few years.  I've found a lot of carcasses along the river and in moist areas of the forest in the last month, but they're decomposing rather quickly.  If the spring is the only time that the insects come out to feed on blood, that explains why I couldn't find any trace of them—they were mostly gone by the time the Doctor awakened us from stasis.

 

"I'm not sure why my cysts became cancerous earlier than yours. It was probably due to gender differences, body type, hereditary pre-dispositions to cancer—a lot of things or a combination of all or any one of them, I don't know. The entire thing depended on the plasma storms however, and the production and of the beta-deoxyhylaurine compound as one of the reaction by-products of the coherent plasma streamer formations we detected.  In us it simply arrested the action of the virus because of the frequency of the plasma storms during the late spring and summer months.  Since we didn't have the genes to be able to convert it to the active alpha-oxy form, nor produce the dimer necessary for destroying the virus, the amounts in the environment—the air and the water—was enough to keep the virus in check. 

 

“On Voyager, there was none of the beta-deoxy form present, so that when our bodies metabolised what was stored in our cells, we got sick. In the other animals native to this part of the world it provided full protection by being enzymatically transformed into it's alternate form and activating other genes in the animals to produce compounds which would eradicate the virus or keep it at very low levels.  In the winter when the plasma storms are scarce, the animals either hibernate or begin to leave once the beta-deoxy form begins to decline in the environment during the fall. The only animals active in the winter, were those that were uninfected, because their ecology leads them to be active during the late summer, fall and winter, or those somehow immune to the virus."

 

All through her explanation, Chakotay could feel himself growing more desperate as he realised what a horrible mistake he'd made.  He'd put her through seven months of hell for absolutely nothing.  There had never been a child, only the most unimaginable pain and heartbreak and she'd had to face them alone.  Even so, she had been able to make the best of it and find a cure for their illness. He looked at her in continued disbelief, not knowing what to say—sorry didn't seem nearly enough, but it was all he had. 

 

"I'm sorry Kathryn," he said softly.  "I'm sorry for everything."

 

"I'm sorry too," she replied looking away sadly.  "If I'd had my way, our child would be dead just months before the cure was found.  All I can say is that at the time it seemed like the right choice."

 

"Or the cure might never have been found," he whispered. He tried to move closer to her but she moved away.

 

"Please, Chakotay," she said softly, turning away again.  "We're both tired.  Go back to bed, you're still recovering from a concussion and need to sleep.  I'll stay out here."

 

He didn't know what to say, and realised that the best thing at that moment was to do nothing, not to press her.  He'd been pressing her all winter, for all the wrong answers, ignoring her, silencing her or speaking louder so that he wouldn't have to listen to what she was saying.  He shook his head and returned to the bedroom.  Just at the threshold, he remembered something he'd forgotten and turned to face her.  "Thank you, Kathryn, for the cure," he said simply and heard a low sob.

 

"You're welcome, Chakotay," she replied, her back still to him, her shoulders shaking as she leaned against the desk crying softly.

 

He entered the bedroom and closed the door, leaving her to her private grief. He dropped to his knees and laid his head on the bed as he sobbed softly. The whispers swirled around in his head, ghosts of the last seven months mocking him.  He'd thrown away everything he'd held dear in his anger once again—stubbornly refusing to listen to anyone else because he had known he was right, refusing to acknowledge that someone else had a valid point of view.  He'd thrown his colony away because he'd been certain that his belief in the Federation was right; then he'd thrown Starfleet away because of his absolute certainty that the Marquis was right; and now he'd thrown Kathryn away because he had known absolutely that he had been right.  He didn't know how to make it up to her or if he could even make it up to her. But as he dragged his aching body into the bed, he vowed that he would make it up to her.

 

****

 

 

"Where do we go from here?" he asked the next morning as they sat across from each other after breakfast.

 

She looked down at her pale hands on the table and answered, "I don't know Chakotay."  She took a deep breath and looked into his eyes.  "But I do know that we can't just pick up where we left off six months ago, not after this.  We can't just pretend that we haven't been the source of some of the darkest moments in each other's lives." 

 

He listened to her speak without interrupting.  He realised that through all this, he'd never really listened to her. 

 

"I don't know if it's possible to go back to having an intimate relationship, or if it's right to.  I sit here, and all I know is that when I needed you the most, you weren't here for me—you shut me out and I had no one to turn to."  She gave a small gasp and wiped her eyes as she continued. He had to force himself not to get up and gather her in his arms—it wasn't what she needed or wanted at the moment.  What she needed was to be heard.

 

"But it's not only that—I couldn't give you the one thing you'd really ever asked of me.  Did you know that I made a vow to you?" she asked softly, meeting his eyes.  His heart leapt at her words and broke from the misery in her eyes.  "No, you couldn't have known that," she whispered and looked away. 

 

"The night we became lovers, I vowed that I wouldn't deny you anything it was in my power to give.  But when you asked for that baby, all I could see were my fears come true. All I could hear was the sound of it crying because it needed to be fed, because it was in pain, because it was dying and no one came to pick it up—because there was no one left to pick it up.  You know, I've said it to my crews hundreds of times, "where there's life there's hope".  You could see that hope and I couldn't and I can't get away from the fact that if I'd had my way, our baby would be dead now—dead because I hadn't the courage to hope."

 

"You judge yourself too harshly Kathryn," he replied as the silence stretched out between them.  "You had a lot of courage—more than I did.  You came to me time after time, but I was too proud, to bloody sure in my own righteousness to listen to anyone else's voice but my own. I've always said that I believed in a woman's right to choose, in anyone's right to choose what was done to their bodies, but when it came down to it, I didn't respect that you had the same choice.  Before this, I couldn't even imagine forcing a woman to do something with her body she didn't want to do—I'd always known that I would loath any man who did that, and yet it's exactly what I did. 

 

“One way or another, I was going to force you to have that child, stay away from you until you were past the point of no return, because I was sure you wouldn't do it alone.  Gods help me, I even went as far as to think that if you did do it alone and something went wrong, then you would deserve it because those were the consequences."

 

He looked into her streaming eyes through his own tears as he continued. "You couldn't have known you would find the cure and you only did because it was cancer and not a child, but what if it had been a child Kathryn?" he asked softly, reaching for her trembling hand on the table.  "You would be very ill or dying right now, both of you dying, because I certainly could not have worked this miracle—there was no way by any stretch of the imagination I could.  You would have died, the baby would have died and I most certainly would have died by next winter, if not sooner.  Believe me Kathryn, neither of us have the monopoly on guilt for some pretty bad mistakes right now.  So we come back to the same question, what now?"

 

"I don't know," she cried softly.  "I guess we start by trying to be friends again and go from there.  I never intended for you to move out. Your room is still there, any time you want to come back, but ..." 

 

Her voice faltered—choked on tears. 

 

"But I can't promise that we can even make a friendship work. There's so much anger and resentment on both sides—no, on my side—I don't know that I have what it takes to make it work again."

 

"But you're willing to try?" he asked, still holding her small hand.

 

"Yes," she replied, barely above a whisper.

 

"Thank you."

 

#

 

Part 5: Denouement and Emergence

 

 

"Ready to do the honours?" Chakotay asked with a smile as he handed her the portable unit.  "All the diagnostics check out and the internal probe's on stand-by."

 

Kathryn returned his smile, not so hesitantly as in the last two weeks, but she wondered if they would ever be comfortable with each other again. "Yes, we'll cloak the greenhouse first, bring it back, then the house, then we'll try the entire system. Here goes."

 

They watched as the entire greenhouse shimmered out of existence and she went over to touch the illusion before joining him at the computer console they'd set up just beyond the bathtub, outside the cloak perimeter.  "Looking good," he commented enthusiastically. "All systems on the internal probe indicate condition green.  Atmosphere, radiation -everything reads normal.  How do the tricorder readings look?"

 

She looked up from the instrument.  "Excellent.  There's a little bleed-off in the high delta Tarok lines, but I've compensated using the remote."

 

"It's still detectable by the shuttle's sensors," Chakotay reported. "Just barely, but it's there. The external quantum probe's another story—the entire greenhouse reads loud and clear, not that I think many people around here are going to be scanning for us on a quantum level."

 

She laughed as she consulted the remote unit again.  "I certainly hope not.  All right, let's activate the phasing mechanism—I'll take her out in degrees of 0.01 up to 0.12 phase difference from this quantum level.  Let me know when it's undetectable by the shuttle's sensors and keep an eye on the internal probe."

 

"Yes, Ma'am," he quipped as he busied himself at the controls.

 

He really was making an effort, she thought gratefully.  He'd moved back two days after their reconciliation and since then had not once made her feel like he was trying to push her into anything, be it friendship or love.  In fact, he had instinctively begun treating her like Captain Janeway again.  She smiled; he was waiting for her to give him permission to call her friend again—she found she was touched by the sentiment. 

 

"All right," he called out as the remote unit showed a phase difference of 0.10.  "The shuttle's sensors have lost her, but the internal probe still shows everything normal. The external probe shows that there's been a 0.04 percent drop in the quantum density."

 

"Ok," she replied becoming infected with his enthusiasm.  "At a density drop of 0.065 percent, we should be able to pass through the matter of the greenhouse without any problem and at 0.15 not even the best sensors should be able to penetrate. Any problems with chronoton radiation?"

 

"None," he replied.  "The density flux capacitors are doing wonderfully—you were right about the mesoquarzite, there's not even a hint of tachyon, chronoton or anti-neutrino radiation. You are definitely going to have to patent this when we get back to the alpha quadrant."

 

"You forget," she replied, blushing a little in pleasure at his praise. "There's a little treaty the Federation signed with the Romulans that they wouldn't develop cloaking technology.  All right, let's take her out some more." 

 

As they worked side by side, she continued to think about him and their relationship.  She wished everything could be as easy as these mechanisms she designed—any problems, you just got in there with a hyperspanner and adjusted it until it worked properly.  She felt a great satisfaction as test after test went off with only a few minor problems and adjustments to be made, but she hadn't really expected anything less. The greatest test was going to be between her and Chakotay—they had to make the relationship work, because for the foreseeable future, each other was all they had.

 

She looked up in surprise as they finished moving the last of the equipment inside the house—he approached her with two flutes of champagne. "To a good day and to success," he said as she accepted her glass.

 

"To a good day and to success," she answered as their glasses touched. She sipped her champagne and smiled as she sat down behind the computer.  "I'd say that went off very well.  We certainly have reason to celebrate—now all we have to do now is make one for the shuttle."

 

He sat down across from her and grinned, "How long do you think that will take?"

 

"Manufacturing and assembly—one to one and a half weeks, all the schematics and patterns have already been worked out and we still have the moulds for the casings. The installation will take anywhere from two to four weeks depending on how easily we can integrate it into the shuttle's systems," she answered enthusiastically. "By the time we finish all that, our treatment regimens should be completed and we'll be able to see if we can leave here—the only question is where to go?" she said softly as she covered his hand.  "Voyager has had a year and four months head start on us already and is getting farther away each day. At the speeds the shuttle can manage, I don't know that we can catch up without finding some wormhole or new technology."

 

"What do you want to do?" he asked holding her gaze.  "Would you be happy going back to live with the descendants of the 37's?"

 

She was silent a moment before she answered, "No, it would never be home to me."

 

"I know," he answered.  "Me neither.  Then all that's left is to try for Voyager."  He smiled and squeezed her hand gently.  "I must admit, it's all I've been thinking about for the last two weeks.  I want to run something by you."

 

"What is it?" she asked intrigued.

 

"Well, we both know that the shuttle won't get us anywhere fast, but what about acquiring another ship—most of the aliens around here have ships that can sustain warp 9 or higher, and I'm sure we can bring almost any system up to Starfleet snuff," he quipped.

 

"How do we go about acquiring a new ship?  I mean, we hardly have much in the way of valuable currency," she said sceptically.

 

He laughed as he sipped his champagne.  "Oh you'd be surprised at what we have that can be valuable—if you take a page out of Neelix's book of value.  However, I was thinking, why buy when you can salvage," he said lifting his eyebrows comically.  She looked at him in astonishment as he continued. "We've passed hundreds of abandoned hulks. I know most of them are already gutted for anything useful, but I'm thinking of a ship that Voyager scanned just before we were stranded here.  It was a small Talaxian ship, little more than ten times the size of the shuttle and abandoned for what looked like about three to five years, so chances are it's still there."

 

He returned her slow smile and moved next to her to gain access to the computer console, on which he displayed a star chart to illustrate his point. "It was drifting here—thirty hours from this system at warp 5.  Now according to our records, the warp core is gone and so was the armament, but it is in surprisingly good shape—unless someone's been using it for target practise in the meantime. 

 

“I remember Neelix being excited about it and saying that if he'd still been in his former profession, he wouldn't have minded trading in his little ship for it.  It is a Reelixia Class ship, so warp cores shouldn't be too hard to come by for it. In fact, there's a Talaxian colony about a week's travel from here, on the edge of the Borodi Empire and from what I remember Neelix saying, it's a fairly cosmopolitan place and has a reputation as a pretty good trader world.  The only thing that he found a drawback was that the Borodi are so vicious that even the Kazon pretty much stay clear of them—which in our case is not such a bad thing."  She laughed at his joke and studied the star chart as he continued.  "Apparently, they think nothing of casual assassinations and they have one particular cultural quirk that pretty much no Kazon can abide by—they're a female dominant society, what sounds like thorough amazons in every way, although their males are no longer considered chattel."

 

Kathryn could feel herself responding to his optimism with a matching sense of excitement. "You've really thought this through—we should be able to purchase a warp core without drawing too much attention to ourselves, although it would probably be wise if we were in disguise.  It looks like the components of the computer core are still there, although probably wiped and in complete disrepair. The rest of the warp drive system seems to be relatively in tact—why hasn't someone—"

 

She did a double take on the stats of the ship and gaped at him in surprise. "Chakotay there's a gigantic hole in the thing—half the belly of the aft section is completely gone!  No wonder no one's salvaged it."

 

He grinned at her and shook his head as he enlarged the view of the ship on the screen.  "And for what I have in mind for her, it won't much matter—because you see, that will be our shuttle docking port," he said smiling and ran a simulation of the shuttle connecting to the underside of the ship with its nacelles sticking out.

 

"Elegant," she said admiringly.  "A few transverse bulkheads, a reinforced structural integrity field and an array of force fields would make her space worthy.  Shield configuration might be a problem though, with the shuttle's nacelles sticking out like that, but it might just work."

 

"I thought your sense of improvisation would approve," he replied still grinning at her.  "However, it's definitely going to be a major undertaking.  In addition to the warp core, we would still need an entire armament compliment.  All we have are the shuttle's phasers and six standard photon torpedoes. We also need navigation systems, decent sensors—although we can probably replicate at least the circuitry components for that and we'll need a lot of miscellaneous things we haven't even begun to think about.  What she has going for her is that aside from the hole in the belly, which took out the lower aft cargo compartment, she’s in good shape.  The only other hull breaches are a minor one on the bridge and one in engineering where the warp core assembly was taken out.

 

“There are four crew berths on one side, and two on the other together with the kitchen and mess hall.  The engine room is intact and spans all three decks just aft of the bridge—so we won't have far to go—while the rest of it appears to be cargo space. There are two other cargo holds in addition the lower aft one.  The forward cargo hold runs under the crew quarters, spanning decks two and three aft of engineering.  I was thinking that it could be our airponics bay.  Meanwhile the second hold—upper aft—is just above where the shuttle would slot in and can be used to store whatever miscellaneous things we have.  The bridge is fairly large—sort of decks one and two of the forward section just in front of engineering, and the weapons array is beneath it on deck three. The living area is situated aft of engineering on deck one and stop forward of the upper aft cargo bay. If all goes well about acquiring the things we need to salvage her, we're still looking at about at least six months worth of work, maybe even a year or more," he said honestly.

 

She nodded, still contemplating the design of the ship.  "But puttering around in a shuttle which only has a sustainable cruising velocity of warp 4.5 is not going to get us any where fast and it can't go any faster that warp 7.  According to this, the Reelixia Class has a sustainable cruising velocity of warp 7.5.  Even if it starts out an entire year later, it would still catch up and pass the shuttle in a matter of a few months.  Maximum warp capability is warp 9—not bad at all. The weapon's array is reasonable, provided we can purchase the armaments to go with it, or at least adapt some ... thing—while the shield grid seems fairly sturdy.  One of my concerns is that it may be too big for just the two of us to handle by ourselves.  It looks like it normally takes a crew of six to run."

 

"Nine," he corrected smiling at her.  "The Captain has her own quarters, while the rest double up. But you must admit it is possible—and it's about the smallest ship we'll find around here with the range we need. Its warp capabilities can probably be enhanced by a few judicious Starfleet modifications and we'd also have the cloaking device. It's not as if we're going to be looking to fight any battles, but we have to make sure we can defend ourselves if we need to.  With the cloak, we have a way to extricate ourselves from sticky situations, hopefully before it comes to a fight.  We'll also have the advantage of the shuttle's transporters—one of the things that doesn't seem to be widespread in this quadrant. If this pans out, then the next thing to work on would be tracking Voyager and somehow catch up with her—we have her most probable path, but it's going to take some major creative thinking on our part."

 

"Well, Commander," she turned to him smiling.  "It looks like we'll know if we have a ship in about three weeks, once we've finished the cloaking device and see whether or not we can safely leave the planet.  It also looks like we're going to be pretty busy for a while."

 

"Aye Captain, that we are," he replied.  "That we are."

 

****

 

 

Chakotay listened to Kathryn move around in the living room and glanced at the chronometer—23:12 hours.  She really should get some sleep, he thought, but he knew that she was probably restless in view of the fact that they would be returning to the depths of space for the first time in sixteen months.  He also felt a sense of heady excitement at the prospect, and it was all he could do to stay in bed trying to relax. None of his techniques seemed to be working. 

 

Kathryn had been acting mysterious for the last two weeks as they got the cloaking device installed in the shuttle, but refused to give him any hints about what she'd been doing.  Their easy bantering the last few days reminded him of the way they had been at the beginning of their exile when she'd wheedled him about the bathtub he'd been building.  Now, she was definitely up to something, but no amount of wheedling on his part was going to get it out of her until she was good and ready, and to be frank, that was fine with him.  Now more than ever, he appreciated every moment of laughter and the impish sense of fun that was slowly returning to her.

 

"Chakotay, could you come out here for a minute?" she called, and he smiled hearing that same note of laughter in her voice as he hurried out. He looked around the empty room puzzled, then went to the door, but she didn't appear to be outside.

 

"Kathryn?" he called, but there was no answer—perhaps he'd misinterpreted her. She was probably in her bedroom. He crossed quickly to her door and knocked gently.  "Kathryn, are you in there?"

 

"No, I'm right here."  Her voice sounded close to his ear and he whirled around in surprise to find no one.

 

"Kathryn?" Unease crept into his voice as he scanned the room.  "Where are you?"

 

"Put on the pair of glasses on the table, Chakotay," her voice directed.

 

He picked up the pair of amber tinted glasses he hadn't noticed before and did as she requested.  He gasped as her shimmering form suddenly appeared before him.  She appeared to be wearing a tight fitting body suit made of pure light, her hair neatly tucked into the snug hood and her hands and feet sheathed in gloves and boots.  Her face was bathed in a ghostly halo behind the glasses and only her mouth, curled in an impish smile was really defined.  He raised the glasses slowly from his eyes and she disappeared, reappearing when he lowered them again.  "Kathryn, what is this?" he asked excitedly as she manipulated the small control panel on her wrist and appeared before him in a space black bodysuit with hood.  She drew back the hood and grinned as he continued excitedly.  "You came up with a personal cloak?" he asked in astonishment as he circled her.

 

"Not quite," she laughed.  "It's an illusion—done with smoke and mirrors if you will, more along the lines of a holographic projection than a true cloak. I got a brainstorm as we were installing the cloak into the shuttle.  You pointed out that if worse comes to worse, because of the mesoquartzite in the emitter array, even if we couldn't cloak for some reason, we could probably use the system to broadcast high resolution holograms complete with false warp signatures—confuse the issue to better our chances of escape.  It's the same principle, there's a mesoquarzite emitter web embedded in the fibres of the suit, but without the energy systems of a cloak, it's no more harmful than interacting with holograms on the holodeck.  Furthermore, a single energy cell from a phaser powers the entire system.  The glasses have an emitter array embedded in the frame to cloak the face and a band to go around the head to make sure they stay on."

 

She laughed again as he gave a great yell and swooped her up into a big bear hug and continued her explanation as he put her down.  "It's not a true cloak by any means, although I've managed to mask our life form signals with a few tricks, and it offers a little more protection than our normal clothing.  I tried to install a version of a personal shield, but the systems were incompatible—besides, body shields are pretty tricky and dangerous to organic tissue if anything goes wrong.  Practically anyone can detect it if they put their minds to it, but I designed it from the perspective of making a quick get away from a sticky situation—which I have no doubt we are bound to have once we start to interact with people again.  Since there are only the two of us, we'll need every edge we can get." He gazed at her admiringly and she blushed in embarrassment as she picked up a bundle from the chair. "Why don't you go try yours on and I'll make sure it's in working condition," she suggested softly.

 

Chakotay accepted the bundle and hurried back to his room.  He listened to her running commentary as he hastened to put it on with trembling hands. 

 

"I figure we can wear them under light loose clothing that's easily discarded, and the boots are sturdy enough for everyday use.  I used a variation on that bonding glaze you made—it didn't need to be heated and made the fibres tough, while still leaving them supple and the cloth as breathable as cotton.  It won't cut or tear easily and I don't think a small tear will be noticeable.  We will however, have to turn it off in order to get a transporter lock, although you'll be easy to track on the shuttle's sensors."

 

Chakotay smiled at her as he hurried out, quickly pulling the hood up over the snug band of the glasses.  "Well, how do I look?"

 

She grinned at him appraisingly and answered, "Very handsome indeed."

 

****

 

 

He accepted the cup of coffee from her as he kept one eye on the shuttle's navigational display.  "Well, how's everything?"

 

"Still so far so good," she replied, sitting next to him and sipping her coffee.  "Except for slightly elevated stress levels, everything's fine—no sign of the virus or any symptoms in either of us."  He nodded happily.  They'd spent the last two days on the planet's moon, setting up and camouflaging a sensor net to detect ships as they entered the system and neither of them had showed any signs of the disease.  Now they were on their way to find the abandoned Talaxian ship.

 

"We should be coming into sensor range of the ship in about five minutes, if it's still there," he reported and smiled inwardly at how well she looked in the body hugging camouflage suit.

 

He could sense her excitement as she turned her attention to the sensor display. "I have a feeling that it's going to be there."  After a moment, she looked at him a little uncertainly.  "Do you think we can really pull this off, Chakotay?" she asked softly.

 

He returned her gaze honestly.  "A year ago, as we started to build a life here, I would have said no.  Your research seemed almost futile—like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack, but look at all we've accomplished.  We're cured Kathryn, and that is by no means a trivial feat.  We have a sensor web on the moon, cloaking devices, these suits.  We've accomplished a lot—you've accomplished a lot, Kathryn—so yes, I do think that we can pull this off.  It's not going to be easy, but hey, where's the fun in easy, huh?"

 

She nodded, still holding his gaze.  A small current of understanding passed between them and she shivered.

 

The beeping of the sensor panel interrupted the silence between them and they turned reluctantly to their controls.  "There she is," Kathryn said softly.  "Heading one-four-seven—mark two." She met his eyes with a shy smile. "Thanks Chakotay," she said softly.

 

"And thank you Kathryn," he replied smiling before turning his attention back to his display panel.  "She's coming into visual range now," he reported after a few minutes. "I'll take us on a few quick cursory passes to check her structure more closely, then I'll see if I can manoeuvre us into the breach."

 

Kathryn chuckled softly.  "Right now that is the most beautiful sight in the quadrant," she said. "There doesn't seem to be any new structural damage from the outside, but still, she certainly is a mess. Quite a bit of her shield emitter array also seems to have survived.  Port side weapon's array seems the hardest hit.  I wonder what her cargo had been to make someone take out the cargo hold like that.  Surely a breaching pod would have done a better job."

 

"It looks like they just cut the floor out and took whatever was there," he returned.  "I'm not reading an atmosphere anywhere or any power, but she's still in sound shape. Once we've sealed the breaches, it should be easy to maintain the atmosphere.  Well are you ready to go aboard and survey the damage from the inside?"  She nodded briefly as he began manoeuvring into the aft hull breach.

 

"Disengaging phasing mechanism, mooring field clamps are activated," she reported. A moment later they experienced a slight shudder.  "Mooring complete.  The cloak is still engaged—no problems."  She took a deep breath and looked at him.

 

He winked at her and she laughed as they rose.  "Well, let's get into the evac-suits and see what we have."

 

Ten minutes later, they were on the bridge surveying the damage. He watched her standing silently at the forward viewscreen, proud and erect even in the bulky evac-suit, and he knew this was where she belonged—on the bridge of her ship out among the stars.

 

 

The End.

 

 

 

 


End file.
